There is not a day that goes by that I don’t have to stop what I am doing to answer the phone while some stupid SEO tries to sell me his services. And too make it worst there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get at least two spam emails from some SEO company trying to sell me their services.

Since these guys have decided to drive me crazy I figured I might as well put their information to good use.

So here’s the thing, I am taking my SEO Watch Dog website and I will start doing website reviews for companies that either call or spam me.

If your website isn’t set up correctly then I would think twice before spamming me and since the statics for online SEO vs. Offline marketing look something like this.

1.  80% of consumers research online before buying offline?

2.   70% of people searching Google never click past the first 3 links?

3.   60% of all traffic on the internet is now video?

4.   YouTube is the #1 search engine?

Since you are calling me and sending me spam email instead of using the search engines to drive traffic to your business I can only guess that the reason for this is that you yourself don’t know how to market your own business online.

So you have resorted to offline marketing to sell and online service that you cannot even do.

8 Costly SEO Mistakes That Local Businesses Make

Quick – how many results do you think you’d get if you searched for “SEO” on Google? Five hundred million? Try almost a billion. With so much free info about SEO out there, you would think it’s very easy to become an SEO guru. However, the abundance of low-quality information, worthless spinner articles, and varying “expert” opinions have made the SEO roadmap a tad confusing for newcomers. Maybe that’s why so many local businesses often make mistakes when attempting to implement SEO. Side step the following mistakes and you will find yourself on your way to running a more effective and profitable operation.

1. Being a Copy Cat

Looking at the sites in your niche and copying what you think your competitor’s strategy is? Bad idea. Who knows if they are employing the best SEO practices or will even still be around in a couple of months? Just because they may have ended up on the first page of Google doesn’t mean they don’t have a bad reputation for low-quality content and spammy links.

For example, wireless company Clear has their Clear Internet reviews displayed on the homepage. Before deciding to replicate the same feature on your site, take some time to research whether this is indeed a best practice and if it makes sense for your particular local business. It’s always best for you to do your homework on what the actual best practices are, and grow your site with quality in mind rather than quick, run-of-the-mill tactics.

2. Putting Your Money in All the Wrong Places

Many small businesses waste their money trying to buy links rather than researching what their real SEO needs are. Instead of buying links, startup businesses should consider hiring an SEO consultant to get them up to speed on what needs to be done to maximize their presence on the web. A skilled SEO specialist can instruct you on keyword research, blogging, links, and building relationships, which is invaluable advice for any serious business.

3. Putting Your Website on Auto-Pilot

Want to relive the nineties? You can, by just uploading your company brochure as content to your site. When the Internet was still very new, companies that were hip enough to be online would often download a PDF on to their site and think they were doing well by just having a presence on the World Wide Web.

Obviously, it goes without saying that this “strategy” of growing your business is both obsolete and inefficient, but every now and again, you can still find some companies that do this. If you want your company to actually generate revenue, you can start by hosting many different, relevant articles about your services or products and making sure they are written in a compelling way. This will encourage other sites to link to you, which leads to backlinks and, in turn, higher rankings in the search engine results pages.

4. Losing Sight of What Matters Most

If you aren’t invested in your product, focusing on keywords, for instance, won’t make much of a difference. Don’t get so caught up on monitoring your incoming traffic that you forget about why you have a website in the first place. Some people don’t realize that a part of SEO is actually having a good product – what’s the point of struggling to get your website ranked highly if there’s nothing to see when people get there?

5. Hiring a Turkey

So months have passed and now you realize that the SEO specialist you hired is a dud (read: none of the promised SEO results have been delivered). Rather than getting burned a second time, let a number of consultants compete for the job. The specialist that stands out will be able to offer some free advice that you can test out before signing on the dotted line. Remember, the cream always rises to the top.

6. Establishing Benchmarks

Even though SEO success can take at least six months to measure, you still need to establish what success is supposed to look like. In order to do this you will need to be clear about what you are willing to put in to it (i.e., budget associated with consultants, content creation and software) as well as how you will be able to track it (how has your traffic increased? what keywords are working the best?). Without clear goals, you aren’t developing your website efficiently.

7. Allowing Your Online Listings to Fall Through the Cracks

As a local business, you need to manage and fine-tune every site that lists your company. Sites such as City Search, Google Places and FourSquare all offer information about your business. Why is this important? Because premier search engines, such as Google, use what is displayed on those sites to weigh how relevant you are to your area. A customer who submitted a review of your company using the wrong address will get you nowhere – take the time to make all of your public entries consistent, accurate and complete.

8. Failing to See the Forest for the Trees

SEO involves keywords, backlinks, great content, and a solid brand, among other things. Focusing too much on any one aspect of SEO is a fallacy. The sooner you understand all the working parts, is the sooner your site will be a well-oiled machine.

SEO can be mastered, but it may take a little time. Just like you wouldn’t blindly hire someone to manage your finances, you shouldn’t rush to employ a shoddy SEO plan in your business. Doing research, hiring a skilled team and developing a strong brand are all actions you can take to ensure you don’t fall in to the same SEO pitfalls that other local businesses have succumbed to.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don‘t talk about backlinks to someone. Most people who are not involved with a website don’t even know what a backlink is.

Basically a back link is when a website links from their website to your website with a link that takes a surfer directly to your website. It’s pretty simple to see how backlinks can equal more traffic and more business.

However, this isn’t the only reason to get back links.

A backlink is a type of referral that Google uses to measure your website’s reputation. Google catalogs the number of backlinks and the strength of those backlinks to determine how well your website should rank for the different keywords.

Other words, by getting backlinks you’re getting traffic from other websites as well as raising your visibility in the major search engines like Google.

Back links are important!

And while we are talking about how important backlinks are let’s not forget that they are also used to determine how much are website is worth when you’re getting ready to sell it.

However, not all backlinks are the same.

When it comes to the Internet nothing is as straightforward as it seems. You see most tech wizards and geek geniuses have ended up working for one of the major search engines. This means that even though a standard HTML URL is easy enough to understand, search engine optimization is a totally different game. To make it even more difficult it’s a very secretive game.

Google and the other search engines know that if anyone understood their exact formula they could rank any site for any keyword.

So, while you can learn a lot about how to code and get backlinks, you will never totally understand what each backlink is worth.

Back links have always been a dominant factor when trying to rank for a competitive keyword. However, in the past the algorithms were not designed to take into account people trying to game the system.

Google was one of the first major search engines to start looking at how to reward quality links that were relevant to the content and added something to the site instead of rewarding links that were gaming the system.

Google can now determine quality links while penalizing non-quality links.

Links are no longer counted just for their coding, but the environment around the link is also counted. The environment includes page rank of the site that is linking to you as well as the content on the page and the back links that page has.

Page Rank ranges from 1 to 10, the higher the number the stronger the  link.

This number is nothing more than a measurement of the sites reputation according to the search engine’s algorithm. What you want is a backlink from a site that not only has a higher Page Rank than you do but also has something to do with the content of your site. If your site is about cars you want to be included in a site that reviews car web sites. If you get backlinks from someone who is selling Bibles, it’s likely to be ignored is a good quality backlink.

A link that shows up near the top of the referring page is worth more than one at the bottom.

Of course something else that a lot of people overlook is the anchor text. If you have a site that sells wristbands and the anchor text says pretty wristbands then it won’t be as effect as one that clearly describes your wristbands like quality silicone wristbands.

You need quality anchor text.

In the past people would join link exchange sites to get reciprocal links. But now the search engines actually discount reciprocal links in favor of one way inbound links. This makes it a lot harder to get links because you are no longer able to trade a link for a link.

Here’s how the search engines think.

If I meet someone on the street and they tell me where they live I can get an idea about the person by the neighborhood they live in. I can tell a lot about that person from their neighbors.

The search engines work about the same way, spiders crawl sites that link to you and get an idea about you from what they are saying. If these are quality websites, who are in the same niche as you, and are linking to your site, then it’s a highly relevant and important link.

Immediately we know it’s about quality not quantity.

It’s not how many neighbors you have but the type of neighbors you have. It’s the reason a lot of people get confused about PageRank because it’s not based on the number of links but rather the quality of those links. This is why often times a site with fewer backlinks will outrank a larger site that has more backlinks just by getting the right type of links.

And this makes our job as SEO’s a lot easier. While search engines are programmed people are not. It only takes a couple minutes for a person to form an opinion or get an idea about you and your business. Directing people to your site from link farms and other like-minded sites will hurt your reputation a lot more than any benefits you’ll ever get from them.

And if you’re wondering what an SEO is, there is actually a whole culture built around Google and their search engine policies. Some practices are labeled “Black Hat” for evil marketing practices and other’s white hat practices because these are more natural.

But at the end of the day many gray areas appear on both sides as they are basically things that are commercially motivated but are really hard for search engine to spot.

Now, Google’s focus is keeping themselves in business and if it means destroying you and your business to do so you shouldn’t blame them, however your main goal should be keeping yourself in business and you should look at all your options and decide what’s going to work best for you and not necessarily was going to work best for search engines. Who really even knows rather Google will be here tomorrow?

So your focus should be keeping yourself in business and making sure you don’t trip any of the wires that are keeping others in business.

Since I am starting to add content to the site I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of onsite SEO factors, that I would like to set up for each page. I just want to hit on a couple things quickly, as I believe that onsite optimization only counts for about 10% of our total ranking score. This means I do not won’t to spend too much time on this.

I want more from my title tag then for it to just include my keywords.

I want it to read like a call to action, have less than 70 characters and include and LSI keyword all while still including my main keyword (for that page) first.

I want more from my description tag then just a place to stick more keywords.

I want it to be short, include my main keywords and arouse enough curiosity that it alone can increase click through.

Yep, I use keyword tags because there are a lot more search engines then Google.

I want to keep it at a maximum of 7 keywords. Basically my main keywords along with a couple variations and of course every page has its own unique title, description and keyword tag.

I want all my images and graphics to include my keywords in the design of the site. Other words, label images as SMM and not image header1.

I want to use header tags from h1 to h4 whenever they fit in and are needed.

I want every page to include at least one image and I want all my images saved and optimized for my main keywords for that page. The images are important because I can rank them easily for the image search and start driving traffic to my site almost immediately from the image searches.

So basically I want my keywords in:

_ the file name,

_ the title attribute,

_ the alt attribute

_ and in a link, if there is a link on the page.

I want all page names to include a keyword.

I want 500-700 words of unique text on every page with my main keyword showing up in the first 50 words as well as in the middle of the page and at the end of the page. I also want LSI variation and to keep the keyword density at around about 1%.

If at all possible I want to use header tags but if not then at the very least I want the keywords to show up in bolded text at least once. I also want to include links to other pages on the site, so each page links to other pages using the content of the page for the link.

I want the footer to include my privacy policy and terms pages, and of course both will be named in such a way as to include my main keywords.

I do not want a home page link but rather a link with the anchor text of SMM that links back to the home page. I want footer links to my main keyword pages and I want links throughout the site that link to authority sites.

I also want my RSS feed to include my main keyword. And I want to include videos throughout the site. I will not be using nofollow tags as I want be linking to any sites that I don’t trust. I want to set the site up to redirect to the url without the www in it.

Search Engine Optimization Tutorials

When doing SEO there are some things you need to think about are;

How does the website fit into its web neighborhood?

How do the search engines see the website?

Does the site have good site architect?

How do the search engines see the content?

When people surf the Internet they generally view domain names as if they were their own little island of information. This works perfectly well for the average surfer but for an SEO this is a big mistake. Websites, whether the website owner likes it or not, are interconnected, this is key when understanding SEO.

Take Facebook, for example. It started out hidden behind a login. They thought it could be different and remain completely independent. This worked for a while and Facebook gained a lot of popularity. Eventually, a friend became fed up with the lock down communication silo of Facebook and started his own site and called it twitter. Twitter grew even faster than Facebook and challenged it as the media darling. Twitter was smart and made its contents readily available to both developers through APIs and search engines.

Facebook responded with Facebook connect, which enables people to log in to Facebook through other websites and users can communicate outside of Facebook’s domain name. Facebook also made a limited amount of information about users visible to search engines. Facebook is a now accepting its place in the Internet community and it started with their decision to embrace other websites. Facebook misjudged the fact that website are best when they are interconnected. Being able to see this connection is one of the skills that separates SEO professionals from SEO fakes.