Local search is now one of the most important aspects of search.  People are turning to their laptops and mobile phones to look for a local business, service or even restaurant.  Here are some tips to help you optimize your site for better placement in the Google Local Box.

Title Tag - Business Name, Location
When optimizing your website it is very important to utilize your title tags.  Many times people neglect this tag, which can be detrimental to the website.  Title tags can be a factor in determining relevance to the local search map.  To give your site a better opportunity of being displayed in the map, utilize geographic terms and specific service types.  Example:  If you are a plumber in Boca Raton Florida, it would be better to use Boca Raton Florida Plumber as your title tag, as opposed to your official company name.  People may not know your company name, but they do know they need a plumber in Boca Raton and that is what they will search for.  This gives the search engines and the users a better idea of what you do and where you are based. Focus on your business type and the location for title tags

Text Based Contact and Address Information
Having your address located on your pages gives the page more relevance, or weight when linking to a page on your site from your local listing.  Search engines see this as consistent information and can reward you by giving you a boost in the results.  It is also a good idea to place a phone number on each page.  Not only with this help with the local results, but it turns each page into a conversion point.  A user can get the information they need to contact you from any page
 
Submit to Local Directories
Local.com, Yelp.com and Yellowpages.com are good places to submit your site.  These local sites are highly searched; user friendly and offer mobile applications so people can look up information from their cell phones.  Another benefit to listing in local search directories is that the major search engines will use data from these directories to give more weight to their own listings.

Don’t Spam
While this is not really a tip it is something you should obviously NOT do.  Google has just released guidelines for how to go about promoting your local listings.  It seems that many people out there have been taking advantage of these listings, and Google wants to keep it fair for everyone.  For more information please read Google’s official Local guidelines.

Welcome back to my series on fixing canonical URL issues. In my last post, Fixing un-canonical URLs. Oh joy! Part 2, I discussed how host names can present un-canonical URLs to the search engines and how to fix those problems. As a review, here again are the areas of canonical URL issues:

1. Protocols (http and https)
2. Domain and subdomain names (sometimes referred to as host names)
3. URL paths
4. File names
5. Case sensitivity (when myPage.html is handled differently than MYPage.HTML)
6. Query strings
7. Combinations of any or all of the above

Let’s continue expanding on other potential culprits of un-canonical URLs.

Your web server is using a setting called ‘default index file’ or ‘default content file.’ This setting was used to allow your web site visitors to see a custom listing or ‘index’ of a directory’s contents by just knowing the name of the directory and without having to know the name of the file that shows this index. This setting is also part of the setup tasks for a new web hosting account and provides security in the case you to didn’t want to show all visitors a list of all files in that directory. This default index file is usually used as an introductory page to the contents in that section of your web site. (Default index files, depending on the kind of server your site is on, have names such as index.html, index.htm, home.html, default.htm, default.html, default.asp, default.aspx, index.php, index.cfm and so on.) With this setting in place, when a visitor goes to a URL that ends in a name of a directory on your web server (including the ‘root’ directory), a trailing forward slash and no file name (something like http://www.example.com/), the web server does not redirect anywhere, but shows the first file it can find in the list of default index files to the visitor. If the visitor types the same URL, but ends it with the name of the default indeed file (something like http://www.example.com/index.html), the web server will also not redirect, but will show the same exact content as without the file name.

Before trying to canonicalize a default index file to a forward slash (“/blog/index.php” -> “/blog/” for example), make sure that the content you expect to show does in fact show when a visitor leaves off the file name in the URL. Also make sure that the web server only responds with a 200 response code. After doing so, you can use one of several methods to 301 redirect “/blog/index.php” to “/blog/” or whatever your situation is. One method is using URL rewriting rules and regular expressions. This method generally provides a faster reaction time by your web server (read: less wait time for your visitors) and is probably a cleaner way compared to the other method, which is incorporating specific logic into your ‘include files.’ The logic of both methods is pretty simple: if the requested URL ends in a forward slash plus one of the default index file names, send a 301 response code and the location of the redirection to the browser. The redirection location will be originally-requested URL with the default index file removed, and ending in a forward slash plus any query strings and/or URL fragments.

When you created a new directory under blogs called Colors, you forgot your convention for naming directories was all lower-case. After creating the directory, you tested it to make sure your visitors would have no problem getting to the pages in that directory. You went to www.example.com/blog/colors and everything looked great. You didn’t realize you made a mistake until noticed in your traffic logs that many people were looking at a slightly different URL: www.example.com/blog/Colors. Most of the time, this is caused by having your site on a Windows-based server and not having anything in place (such as a CMS that is aware of this issue) that can handle this problem. Windows servers are case-insensitive; Linux and Unix servers are case-sensitive. If your site was running on a Linux server and a visitor browsed to www.example.com/blog/colors, they would probably get a Page Not Found error because the ‘colors’ directory doesn’t exist. Windows’ case insensitivity makes it easier for visitors to get to pages in your site if you’ve mixed upper and lower case letters in either your directory or file names (or both).

You can resolve canonical URL issues related to case insensitivity with a variety of methods. First, you can try the tools offered by Google’s Webmaster Tools to find these issues if you’re not sure if or where they might lurk in your site. You can use a simple rewrite rule to 301 redirect any case-variation of a particular URL to the canonical URL. You can use a CMS or blogging software that will automatically change your new page, category or tag name to all lower-case before that page, category or tag goes live on your site.

Also, it is important to know that the paths you enter in your robots.txt file are case-sensitive. If you mean to block access to www.example.com/dontgohere.php by adding “/DontGoHere.php” to your robots.txt file, www.example.com/dontgohere.php will not be blocked.

My next post in this series will be about query strings, the stuff at the end of the URL after the question mark. Please stay tuned!

When it comes to SEO, it is most important for users to find what they are looking for quickly and accurately. That’s pretty much a no-brainer if you’ve been using the internet for a while. But who really thinks about labeling their images for SEO? With all major browsers having a capability to search for images, it is now very important to name your images in a way that will be easy to index and find via any search.

If I was searching for a Dog Jumping, it wouldn’t be wise to name an image something like: img_4484427.jpg.  On the other hand, if the file name was Dog_Jumping.jpg, then I would be much more likely to find it through a search.

Alt tags are another way to add extra oomph to your images. Adding some simple code such as: alt=”Dog Jumping”, might be enough to differentiate you from your competition. It’s all about making relevant content and images more accessible to end users.