Local search sites such as Google+ are a key element of modern small business Internet marketing. But you need to make sure you are taking the right steps in order to maximize your local search visibility. Here are some of the basic things you need to make sure you are doing with your local search page:

LOCATION

Physical Address: You need to let people know where your business is located but this can get tricky if your business is located just outside of a major metropolitan area that you would like to target (such as being in a suburb of a larger city). Your best bet is to create local pages on your site for that city to boost search results. Google can also see where a user is located and often will cater results to their location.

You can also add a city and state to the title tag on your main landing page and other site pages to give sites like Google a clue to your business’ true location.

Listing Citations: Citations are mentions of your business’s Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP). You want to make sure that these are always consistent from listing site to listing site. Using slightly different business names, addresses or phone numbers will hurt your rankings. This is especially true for the NAP you have listed on your local search page versus the NAP listed on your website.

You also want to make sure that you are only listed on high quality sites. Use a tool like GetListed.org to find the leading local search directories. You can also do a web search for your business category in your area to find top results or go to Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder. Locally-relevant citations like Chamber of Commerce listings are positive, as are citations from sites relevant specifically to your industry.

Phone Numbers: Always use your local area code instead of a toll-free number in a local listing.

ORGANIZATION

Domain Authority and Links: Your site will rank higher in local search results if it has a high “Domain Authority.” This metric is based on a website’s age and quality. Doing solid SEO work with local SEO services like eVisible also help. Having high quality links to your site provide a strong signal to search engines about your site. Also, make sure the link you publish on a local search site is your home page or another page with high Page Authority.

Site Verification: When you create a local listing on a site, they will typically ask you to verify it before it goes live. This could be through a link or a verification code sent via a postcard or email.

CONTENT

Business Categories: It’s critical that you take the steps to make sure your business is categorized correctly. If you are setting up a Google+ Local listing, you’ll have to give your general business type and then be able to drill down to specific subcategories.

Reviews: Having a lot of positive reviews for your business is a great thing. However, Google will be concerned if they see a high volume of reviews come in too quickly — this is a sign that the reviews are fake. Encourage customers to give positive reviews but don’t try to “buy” reviews. Having positive third-party reviews (such as from newspapers and blogs) can also improve rankings.

Business Name: If you are starting a new business, you might rank higher more quickly if you include the service you provide in your name. But don’t rename your business or use a different name online – this will only hurt your rankings.

The rules of search engine optimization have changed dramatically in the last few years. Google responded to the glut of low-quality content with Panda and Penguin, algorithm updates that placed an emphasis on quality content and organic search engine optimization rather than keyword-stuffed articles and manipulating site code.

The most important thing to think about when creating an SEO strategy for your website is the visitor experience. This wasn’t always the case; until recently, Google wasn’t concerned about the user experience when determining site rankings. This has changed, as Google is smarter about reviewing sites in a way that mimics how users interact with the site. In short, the best way to improve your link popularity is to have a website that provides useful content and information to visitors.

Adapting to the new SEO landscape means rethinking old tactics that were considered to be the industry standard just a few years ago. Here are four examples of how SEO strategies have shifted recently:

Build Blog Relationships Instead of Buying Links

While Google still places a high value on having your site linked on other sites, the concept of “buying” a high volume of  low quality links via a link network is no longer considered to be a good SEO strategy. In fact, if done incorrectly, you might get punished by Google for this. Instead, you should focus on doing outreach to blogs that are a natural fit for your site. Reach out to them and try to enter into a mutual relationship where you provide their readers with interesting content in exchange for links.

Focus on the On-Screen Design of Your Website

It’s still important to have a website that has a common sense architecture and that has a solid internal structure. But it’s now just as important to have a site that looks great and has content that flows naturally. Google’s spiders can read sites to analyze where and how content is displayed and you need to have a website design that takes advantage of this.

Expand Beyond a Limited Set of Keywords

Until recently, the prevailing method that search engine optimization consulting services used to increase a site’s page ranking was to focus on a limited amount of keywords and use them in the page content, title tags and header tags. Google is now smarter about how it evaluates keywords for rankings. It’s better to come up with keyword groups of related words and use them organically in your on-site content.

Concentrate on Branding

Google frowns on paying for anchor links on unrelated sites. Instead, it wants to see your company’s brand have strength. If this occurs, the power of your brand will give an extra boost to your related page rankings.

Website owners and operators typically believe that having more content on your site is better for SEO purposes, as it gives you more chances to use keywords and create valuable links. But this has changed recently as Google has instituted measures to make the quality of content as important and its quality and to punish websites that have spammy, low-quality content on their site. Having large amounts of low-quality content on your site actually serves as a negative ranking signal for Google and can lead to penalties with your search ranking.

An example of this is performing content curation on your website as an SEO tactic. This can mean creating pages with resources on a category related to your business or having a blog that posts links to relevant outside news articles. On the surface, this is a way to add content to your site and help your search ranking. But the truth is that it might not help you at all.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently answered a question relating to sites that curate content or post duplicate content. The gist was that only sites that are of the highest publishing quality will get a benefit from curating content. This means sites like the New York Times’ website that have a highly recognizable brand based on their content. It’s difficult to have something published in the New York Times and the content is curated by professional editors.

In fact, if you curate content using an algorithm or other automated process, Google might actually punish you. This is because this is essentially what Google does with their search engine results, only they likely do it better. Google sees automatically-generated curated content pages as inferior forms of competition and punishes them.

Most sites will fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. This means that while you might not get punished for having curated content on your site, you likely won’t see many benefits. This can change if you do some things to make your curated content stand out and create signals to Google about the quality of your pages. Getting commentary from experts in your field and using the rel=author tag will increase your credibility in the eyes of Google. If you can pull data from sources that are not available to Google or post content quicker than Google, you also will be seen as providing something of unique value through your curated content.

Anyone with a basic understanding of search engine optimization knows that meta data such as meta descriptions, image alt text and title tags is critical to proper SEO success. But there’s one element that many people forget that can cause SEO campaigns to fail. Not properly implementing a Robots.txt file can make the difference between seeing your search engine rankings soar or sink.

Defining a Robots.txt File

Simply put, a Robots.txt file can help you tell search engines which directories on your site you don’t want them to index. The reasons for this are varied. You might want to make sure to keep sensitive information such as customer banking information on your eCommerce site secure. Or you might have proprietary information posted on certain sections of your website that you want to keep private. Having a Robots.txt file will tell Google, Bing and other legitimate search engines to not index these pages.

Robots.txt Keys for Implementation

Disable access to sensitive directories. This can potentially include directories such as: /cgi-bin/, /wp-admin/, /cart/ and /scripts/.

Remove all barriers to main content. This includes making sure that there are no “no follow” tags that will block searches.

Don’t let search engines index “duplicate” pages on your website. This can include sections of your website that are designed for regular viewing and printing, or content that is designed specifically for mobile sites. It’s better to only have them index the main content page in these cases.

Things to Avoid

Putting comments on your Robots.txt file

Listing all files in your Robots.txt. This actually makes it easier to find files you want to keep hidden.

Don’t use a /allow tag. This doesn’t exist in the Robots.txt file.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending weeks or even months to redesign your website, only to see traffic plummet soon after the new version of the site goes live. It’s especially frustrating because you obviously did all the work because you expected to improve your search engine ranking, get more traffic and see more conversions. Where did it all go wrong?

In most cases, there is no single culprit; it’s usually a series of small mistakes that, on their own, would create minimal damage to your traffic but when taken together can be disastrous. Here are four of the most common problems we’ve found at eVisible when people try to relaunch their sites and their traffic tanks:

Check Google Analytics

It’s possible that your site’s analytic tracking didn’t automatically restart when your new site was launched. Manually check Google Analytics to make sure that it’s enabled and working properly; if it isn’t, check individual pages for issues like missing tracking code placement.

Recheck Google Analytics

You can also go deeper with your analytic research to see if there are unforeseen problems. Make sure that you have 301 redirects for any pages whose address structures have changed and thoroughly look for any 404 pages. Do a keyword search to see which keywords are underperforming and if they have been removed from poorly performing pages.

Review Your robots.txt File

It’s possible that your site has been deindexed for some reason. One possible explanation is with your robots.txt file. Check the head of page source code for a meta robots tag exclaiming noindex and also check for anything that says “disallow:/” in the code.

Check for Host or Server Issues

Changing your hosting or server can lead to communications issues that will make it impossible for search engines to index your site. There are several tools available for checking your DNS health; one thing you absolutely should do is look at your DNS errors and server connectivity in your Google or Bing Webmaster Tools.

Reworking your website to have a more SEO friendly design is a great way to boost your online business’ potential; it can also be intimidating, especially right before your new site goes live. Before you relaunch your site to the world, you need to go through a last-minute checklist to ensure that the launch will be a success. Here are 20 steps that you need to take when finalizing your professional website development:

Onsite Content:

1. Check that all of the content you’ve created – and the old content that you haven’t touched – is free of spelling errors, typos or other problems. Also make sure that the content is compelling for visitors.

2. Open your site in Google Chrome and press F12 and then open the “Network” tab to see your site’s speed and page sizes.

3. Test drive the forms on your site to make sure they work properly.

Web Development:

4. Verify that your site links are correct when they have transferred from the test site to your live site. If you have any 404 pages, develop a custom page with search to encourage visitors to go to other parts of your site. If pages are moved or have a new URL structure, make sure to use a 301 redirect.

5. Validate your W3C code and fix any errors you might have.

6. Add custom Favicons to your address bars or the tabs of users’ browsers to create a custom feel for your site.

7. Minify your site to compress the code and make it load faster.

Web Design

8. Cross-check your site on different browsers to ensure multi-browser compatibility.

9. Check that your display text is coming up when you hover over an image. You should also make sure that your images aren’t too large and that you don’t have issues with fonts not rendering correctly.

Search Engine Optimization

10. Make sure that all pages have title tags and meta tags.

11. Upload an accurate site map in both XML and HTML to make your site easier to navigate for users and search engines.

12. Have your Google Analytics package ready to go along with your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also contact your ad rep if you have any PPC campaigns running to avoid a disruption.

13. Submit your site to the popular search engines to ensure they are indexed immediately.

14. Check to make sure that your SERP display is correct and your pages are displaying properly on search engine result pages.

15. Make sure that your social media buttons go to the right pages and allow people to “Like” the right parts of your site.

Network Administration:

16. Install site monitors to ensure visitors can get to your pages and use enhanced monitors for your key landing pages.

17. Run tests with load test software tools to simulate what will happen to your site in times of heavy traffic.

18. Have a backup system ready to go in case your site does crash.

19. Check password-protected pages to make sure people can’t get into them without the proper credentials.

20. If you have a secure certificate, check it to make sure it is valid on launch day.

One of the most important but often overlooked parts of any SEO campaign is landing page optimization. This is the process of making sure that your landing pages – i.e. your home page and other key pages on your site – are designed for SEO success as well as to convert visitors to customers. You can see why this is so important – after all, what is the point of getting customers to your home page if they are going to leave your site before they buy anything?

Even though it’s apparent that increasing your landing page conversion rate is critical to the success of your site, not everyone knows how to do this. To help you out, we’ve compiled five easy steps to help turn curious site visitors into happy customers:

Customer Validation: Potential customers want to see that people just like them have had positive experiences with your products or services. You can let your past sales work for you by aggressively seeking testimonials from your customers and posting them prominently on your website.

Make Customers Feel They Are Missing Out: The “herd mentality” is a real thing when it comes to online marketing. Customers are more likely to purchase your product if they feel like other people are doing the same thing. Call if safety in numbers or not wanting to miss out on the next big thing. You can play to this by showing how many people have recently purchased or tried out your product or offering.

Customize Your Pitch: Customers want to feel like they are special and not just one of the many people receiving a sales pitch. There are many ways that you can customize your sales pitch to reach out to customers on an individual basis. You can use software to insert a person’s name or hometown, or send a different pitch to male or female customers.

Keep Access Limited:  What’s the best way to get people curious about something? Keep it hidden from them. You can do this with your online content as a way to get customers interested in what you are offering. Give them a little taste of some interesting content but ask them to send their email address to you in order to read the rest.

Speed Matters: Don’t overlook the speed of your website. If your website is slow to load, potential customers might give up and go to a different site.

SEO has changed the way that we look at online marketing. It’s led to companies getting smarter about how they develop their online marketing strategy and how they can incorporate many tactics to improve their search engine ranking. However, some people seem to think that SEO is a quick fix that eliminates the need for traditional online marketing.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. While SEO is a powerful tool, it should only be one part of an integrated online marketing game plan. In fact, misunderstanding the role of SEO has led some people to develop warped ideas about online marketing. Here are four of the most common misconceptions about online marketing that people have developed thanks to SEO:

You aren’t in a battle against Google. It’s easy to think that Google has something against you personally if you are struggling to take your search engine placement to the first page. Much of this comes from the fact that there is an air of mystery behind Google’s algorithms used in search engine rankings. Because of this, many online marketers wildly vary their campaigns to reflect what they think are Google’s latest changes. This is almost always just guesswork. Instead, companies should focus on making the core SEO values that don’t change such as quality content and not focus all of their efforts on pleasing Google.

You need to invest time – and money – into any successful SEO campaign. Search engine optimization is a great way to maximize your marketing budget and see instant results. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s “free” marketing. You still need to invest resources into an SEO campaign. This can including spending money on a link building campaign or time in researching keywords and developing appropriate content.

You won’t make money without offering something of value. While it’s true that you can get a site to the top of Google search pages simply by buying links, spun content and a low-quality website, will this make you money? Eventually, people are going to see the quality (or lack) of your offerings. It’s always better to base your success on high quality content and products.

Real world testing is better than solely relying on expert advice. It’s never a bad idea to do research and read articles from experts explaining things that have worked for them. But there’s no substitute for doing your own research and learning through trial and error.