Old-school big book directories used to be the first place people went to find a local business. Need a contractor, dentist, lawyer, whatever? Grab the book. It often made sense for small businesses to make the commercial phone book the first step in marketing a new business. But who uses the yellow pages anymore when Google, Bing and Yahoo are readily available on your computer or mobile device? The Super-Yellow-Books all have their own directory sites, but those probably don’t get much more use than the printed version. It is easy to see why these companies are trying to stake out their claim in the modern world of search engine marketing. Like newspapers had to adapt to their readers migration to the web, yellow pages directories must know they need to evolve or face extinction.  

Do yellow pages sales people want you to succeed with real search engine optimization - or do they want you to fail online so you will buy more ads in their print directories?

The phone directory companies are now proclaiming themselves SEO experts and behaving just as badly as many of the other self-proclaimed gurus we have railed about in the past. They have ridiculous monthly fees, scare people about losing their position in search results if they stop paying, charge per-click rates and claim to lower your rank to keep you under budget. Wait, what?! Per-click?! If they are really doing search engine optimization, why and how would they do that?
NOBODY can guarantee specific positions in real search engine results, so what are they actually doing? Maybe they are just managing an Adwords campaign for you, or maybe just pretending that their directory listings are real search engine results.  
Whatever it is smells fishy – just like the fraudulent SEOs who will “remove” links to your site if you end your contract. That isn’t search engine optimization, it is called “buying links”. 

Even worse, businesses who don’t already have a website are often talked into hosting a site with these bloated dinosaurs, making it even harder to get away when it becomes obvious that it was a bad investment.  It seems like they are hoping their business customers stay uninformed and afraid of the unknown, and blindly stick with these trusted names.  After all, they have been in local business marketing for years, so of course they would be the best at this newer medium that has nearly destroyed their entire way of doing things, right? Um… yeah. Think about it – do they really want you to succeed online with good results from SEO – or would they rather have you think “I tried marketing on the interwebs but it doesn’t work for a business like mine” and continue buying ads in their print directories? 

A quick audit of what these companies actually do for clients shows that they don’t do very much.  Some businesses had just a few links to their website after a year of service, none of which had anything to do with the directory service.  None of them had any optimization done on their website, which would be one of the first things a real SEO provider would do!  Some had the type of useless garbage links you would get from those shady offers you get in spam emails.  So these big local search marketing experts are either not doing anything, or outsourcing to some pretty lame providers. Sure, they can offer great placement on their own website, which I guess they can call a “search engine”, but that just isn’t what their customers are led to believe they will get.

To be fair, if you have a business that does not really need its own website but you just need to get your contact info and list of services on the web, then by all means hit all the local business directories for their free listings. And look at MerchantCircle, Manta, CitySearch, Angie’s List and the dozens of other local biz listings.  Most of them offer some type of free listing. And if you really want to have your information where people are actually looking for it, set up a Google Places page, which will cost you nothing.  Don’t fall for that phone scam from people claiming to represent Google who have “noticed your listing is incomplete”. They want to charge you for what is actually a free listing.  This should probably be a whole other article since it has become pretty common, but it warrants a mention here. Now if they are offering to set up your Google Places listing for you and they are not claiming to work for Google, that is a different story – plenty of legitimate online marketing companies do offer Google Places/Maps set up (we do, but usually not as a stand-alone item since it is pretty easy for you to do yourself). Just avoid the ones that cold call you with scare tactics.

The worst part is these big book directory companies don’t seem to deliver anything close the results they promise, and they are charging premium rates for an alleged improvement in your position in Google, Yahoo and Bing. They definitely do not offer anything that compares to the solid, lasting results that real SEO can do for local small business marketing.

Local SEO Scams From Big Name Companies You Trust is from: Ker Communications

Of course there are thousands of website design, SEO consultants, social media agencies and internet marketing companies to choose from, but sometimes you just want to do business locally. If you are looking for great service when it comes to online marketing and you want to keep your search limited to local Pittsburgh SEO companies, look no further than Ker Communications in Pittsburgh, PA. When it comes to getting locally targeted traffic for your website or managing your social media, our solid familiarity with the people, places, culture and even the language of Pittsburgh and western PA can make all the difference in the world.

Yinz need help with your website n’at?

Pittsburgh SEO and Internet Marketing is from: Ker Communications

Here are some commonly held beliefs that need some clarification:

“I don’t need on site SEO, just 100 more links”

There is just too much misinformation about SEO out there for you to assume your on site optimization has been done right.  Many times we will have a new client tell us it is all taken care of, then we discover their pages are keyword stuffed, title tags are too long or duplicated, no meta descriptions exist, all the internal links say “click here”, content is duplicated elsewhere in the site or stolen from another site, or pages are cloaked or hidden in an attempt to trick the search engines.

Another variation of this is the idea that some webmasters have that on site optimization is not necessary and all you need is lots and lots of backlinks. You have figured out how many links your competitor has, and it is only a matter of getting more than them, right? Nope – if it was that easy, anybody with some time could make a totally crappy site rank #1 for everything and nobody would ever use search engines.  

While inbound links to your site are one of the most important things that will help your website rank better, quality is becoming increasingly important to Google, links are becoming less important and social signals (Likes, +1′s, Tweets, etc) are becoming more important. Make sure you are creating good quality content, your site is well optimized, and make it easy for readers to like your site. 

“My web designer already optimized my website”

Web designers and developers often don’t know or don’t care what is important to search engines. If the site looks good and all the buttons work, then it is all good as far as they are concerned.  There are many web designers who know SEO, but they are kind of rare.  Unfortunately, most web design classes teach the software and visual design skills, but don’t bother with optimization best practices.  I recently had a web design instructor tell me that he doesn’t teach SEO because it “has nothing to do with web development and it doesn’t work”!  Um, yeah. Right. Think about that when you hire a web designer who just finished school. 

Here are some things that are so basic to search engine optimization that you just can’t call a site optimized if they have not been dealt with properly. These things really should not even be considered as separate from web design since they should be part of any web developer’s best practices when building a website. 

Title Tags 
The element is arguably the single most important on site item that will effect your search engine position. The title of every page should be unique and include the keywords you would like to show up for in searches.  It should be no more than around 60 – 70 characters long and make sense and appeal to readers.  This is the link they will click on in the search results. Think of it as the headline of an ad.  ”Welcome to Our Home Page” is not a good. “Bob’s Widget Emporium – Pittsburgh PA” is better.

Meta Description
This meta tag in the head section of the page should be an accurate description of what the page is about. Think of this as the text copy of a classified ad. In many cases, this will be the text that appears under the link in search results. Like the title, each page should have its own unique meta description.

No “Click Here”
Internal links to other pages on your site should use words that describe the content of the page they point to. The more important links (all your pages are important, right?) should say something like “contact Ker Communications” not  “If you would like to contact Ker Communications, click here“.  Try to avoid using images as link buttons, too. They may look nice, but search engines won’t know what they say. If you must use images rather than doing what you can with text and css styling, be sure to include the image alt attribute.

If any of these basic elements are missing from your website… it isn’t really optimized. 

“It is all about finding loopholes, knowing the secrets and tricking Google”

No, no, a thousand times NO!  Sure, there are plenty of shady characters who work that way, but that isn’t what it is all about. Attempts to deceive search engines and your potential customers will eventually fail. 

Google and the other search engines only succeed as a business when they provide their users with the best possible results for their searches. That is why they constantly change their criteria to determine which sites should rank well for a given keyword. They are refining and improving and their focus is on quality. To get good search engine rankings and keep them, you should focus on quality too. SEO is not magic, nor a set of tactics to game the system. It is a process, knowledge-base and skill-set which will help make sure the search engines are aware of your awesome website. 

“I can submit my site to thousands of search engines”

If you have paid for a search engine submission service, you have been ripped off. Although submitting your website manually to the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) is a good idea, it’s not really necessary if you use good SEO practices. 

And just what are these thousands of search engines and who uses them?! Seriously, can you name more than about 5 or 6 without Googling it? 

“SEO is cheap”

While SEO does have a very high return on investment, effective work rarely comes cheaply. Even with our affordable options for Local SEO, there are still people who think it just costs too much.
Real search engine optimization requires a great deal of knowledge, talent and is a time consuming process.  While there are plenty of low cost outfits that will use the same tired old automated methods over and over for each client, they are rarely effective. SEO that works requires outside the box thinking and the ability to learn and adapt as the process evolves. The “rules” change constantly, so quality SEO requires lots of ongoing research.
Go ahead and trash that $29 eBook you bought a few months ago. 

Of course there are things you can do for free that can help your search engine rankings.  Making sure your site is as technically correct as it can be, and adding a link to your site from any online profiles you may have is a good start. If you have very little competition, then good optimized content and a handful of nice links from relevant sites may be all you need. 

“I can get cheap SEO software that will automate it all”

No you can’t.  There are plenty of apps and websites that will help you do keyword research, find possible link opportunities and analyze your competitors’ link profiles. Some will even give you form letters to send to other web masters to request links. There are some really good tools and plugins that can help you do your on site optimization and you should use a few reliable and useful SEO tools.  But none of them will do the thinking for you. None of them will be able to understand the subtle nuances of language, your customers and your business. And none of them will get you good results on their own.
Automated SEO solutions are a bad idea – if they work at all, there is a high probability that they will do something stupid that will hinder your marketing efforts and keep your site from ranking well.

“Rankings Are Guaranteed”

I have ranted about SEO guarantees in the past so I won’t dig into it too deeply here. Understand that Google’s algorithms change constantly, so nobody can really guarantee rankings.  Search engine optimizers can make a web page more search engine friendly, but nobody can control the actual rankings. Can we guarantee significant improvement and give a reasonable estimate of how high you’ll climb and how long it will take to get there? Yes we can. 

“If I end my contract with my SEO company, they will remove my back links”

If your optimizer threatens to take down links to your site, they were not doing SEO. They were selling you links on sites under their own control.  Real link building is not done by making sites solely for the purpose of backlinking. That is a “link farm” and it won’t work for very long and could end up hurting your rankings.

“Once the site is optimized, I won’t have to do anything else”

This one is somewhat open for debate.  

While the effects of a good SEO campaign will last, rankings may begin to drop after a while if your site doesn’t ever get updated and there are no new inbound links generated. However, if you continue to create good content, the site will stay “fresh” and hopefully you will continue to get real “organic” links from people who find your website useful or in some way “cool”.  This assumes that any new pages are built using SEO best practices, and not the same half-baked way your un-optimized website was made.

If regularly updated content is not practical for you, then you will need to continue at least a casual link building campaign.  

No matter what the situation at the tail end of your SEO campaign, you should continue to keep an eye on your rankings, get back to link building or reworking your content if needed, and use Google’s Webmaster tools to monitor the site for any issues that could hurt your search engine position.

Clear as mud now, right?

This is in no way a complete list of SEO BS.  Just a few of the big ones that still needed some clarification. 
If you have any to add or you have heard of some SEO ideas you think are bogus, use the comments link below and let’s talk about it!

Debunking Common SEO Misconceptions and Myths is from: Ker Communications

Duquesne University Small Business Development Center

I will be doing a break out session on “Search Engine Optimization – The Power of Page One: Why Search Engine Rank Matters & How to Climb Higher”. Since this is a small business oriented event, I will try to focus on some of the basic things small businesses can do to improve their search engine position on a limited budget. If you have ever spoken with me, you probably know I have a tendency to talk at great length on internet marketing topics. So this may prove to be entertaining to watch me try to cram everything you need to know about SEO into a presentation and still leave plenty of time for Q&A. 

My goal is to provide actionable information that conference attendees can apply to their own business website. And I hope to avoid being a real life version of link spam. You know – when you click on a link in a Google search and you don’t get what you had hoped for. I am still working on my presentation notes, so if there is anything you would like to know more about, or if you have suggestions for any sub-topics you would like to know more about please leave a comment below even if you are not attending. 

Other topics that will be covered at the conference:

• Marketing & 2.0 Tools, Trends and Tricks
• E-mail Marketing
• Mobile Apps 
• International: Global Customers: Developing an Internationally friendly Website
• What’s New in Social Media? 
• Mobile-Friendly Websites
• Google Tools for Managing Your Business

For more information about the conference, the agenda and registration, visit http://www.sbdc.duq.edu/TechConf2011.asp 

UPDATE: Registration Discount Available
Use this discount code pbtc79 when you register and pay only $79 (normally it costs $119)

See you there!
~Nick Ker

Duquesne University Small Business Tech Conference is from: Ker Communications

When it comes to getting better search engine ranking for your keywords, providing users with useful, informative, or entertaining content is of course your first priority. Second is good optimization of that content and how it is delivered – your site structure, meta tags, page titles, H1 headings, alt img tags and all that other behind the scenes stuff. Once you have that out of the way, achieving good search engine positions is all about trust, authority and reputation.
Of the hundreds of ways Google and other search engines try to determine just how trustworthy your website is, one of the most important is the number, quality and relevance of other websites that link to yours. As is often said in many aspects of business, “it’s all who you know” – or in this case, who knows you. You may have the best website ever, but until someone knows it – and links to it – the search engines and everyone else aren’t going to know about it.
So how do you get other sites to link to yours? Of course you can hire an SEO consultant or link building company who knows the what where and how, but that is not always in the budget. And even if you do have a pro taking care of most of your search engine optimization and inbound link building, some of it is best handled by you, the website owner. Good SEOs and link builders will know where to find high quality, relevant links to your site, but nobody knows your business better than you do and there are places where you can get links that we search engine marketing weasels can’t. 

Here are some ways to get links to your site that are probably going to work better if you do it yourself. Many of these are also the type of links you should try to get, regardless of what they would mean to your SEO efforts. Good links build trust and reputation, not just PageRank. They are just “good business”. Remember, just because the web can be cold and impersonal doesn’t mean you, your business or your website has to be that way too.

Industry and Trade Publications and Organizations

Are you a member of your Local Area Widget Manufacturer’s Association? If so, see if they have a members list where you can get a link. Check with your vendors, too. If you get a lot of your supplies from one or two places, you may be able to get them to link to you as a happy customer. If they have a testimonials and reviews page, you might offer to write a review (with a link to your site of course). Even if the site is low traffic or not highly ranked, you are still going to get good exposure within your industry and get your name out there.

User Groups and Forums

While discussion forums are often spammed with unrelated links and may not have a lot of value when it comes to SEO, there are some real secret treasures out there. If you use a certain software or service and they have a support forum, join it. Somewhere in your user settings you will probably find a place to put a link to your site in your profile and maybe even a place to set up a “signature”. Use that little space wisely and get your link in there. Then when you ask or answer questions, you get a link. Also, it helps to connect your personality to your business. People like to deal with other people more than they do anonymous websites. That is part of the attraction of social media.

Speaking of Social Media…

Yes, it is time consuming and can even be a little too frivolous at times. But at least a minimal presence on Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, YouTube or other social networks is essential to your success online. Even if the links from many of the social websites are “nofollow” and don’t always directly help your search engine rank, you are still putting your self out there and getting exposure. Of course it is best to be active on at least one or two social networks, and while good social media manager can be your social media spokesperson, nobody can be you better than you can.

Charities and Fundraisers

Many non profit organizations and charities maintain a list of donors or contributors. This is another opportunity to not only get a link, but also the chance to show a very good side of you and your business. The important thing to remember here, as with most link opportunities, is to make sure you really mean it. Don’t just make a donation in exchange for a link. Even if you don’t get a link, you will still look pretty cool. And you can indeed get links by being cool.

Do you see the common idea between these link opportunities? They are not just about improving your PageRank or keyword position in the SERPs. They are also “good PR” – a chance to show your knowledge, authority on a subject, your personality, good citizenship, trustworthiness and help others get to know you and your business. And believe it or not, those are all things that Google and the other search engines are trying to factor into their calculations by counting the number and kind of links, where they are from, how trustworthy they all are… it is all about trust, reputation and how connected you are. Trust is also behind Google’s push toward “personalizing” the web with things like the Google+ social network and ways to indicate authorship of a web page – that’s also why you’ll see my cheesy mug shot beside my articles in search results.  
Work on getting links that help establish your trustability rather than just aiming for high numbers of links or only from sites with the highest PageRank. Use your imagination. The links are out there – and you won’t find them in some “10,000 PR4 backlinks” spam package.

Need help with link building or other internet marketing?  Contact Ker Communications

Where to Find Links That Help Build Trust and Improve Search Engine Ranking is from: Ker Communications