• Publish high-quality, well-captioned images;
• Have pages which already have good PageRank (use traditional SEO to achieve);
• Create a Google Video Sitemap;
• Update business listings in Local Business Center;
• Submit your feed to Google Product Search;
• Create a high-quality company blog;

As you may recall, I’ve written before about how dealer locators are terribly optimized and how store locator pages can be optimized. A great many store locator sections of major corporate sites are not allowing search engine spiders to properly crawl through and index all the locations where they may have brick-and-mortar outlets.

Most large companies seem fairly unaware that their store locators are effectively blocking search engine spiders and are making it impossible for endusers to find their locations through simple keyword searches. I’ve also listed out a number of top store locator providers which produce locational services like this for many Internet Retailer 500 companies.

Read on for details on our results…

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Not long ago, I wrote an article on how some local directory sites were using subdomains in an attempt to achieve good ranking results in search engines. In that article, I concluded that most of these sites were ranking well for other reasons not directly related to the presence of the keyword as a subdomain — I showed some examples of sites which ranked equally well or better in many cases where the keyword was a part of the URI as opposed to the subdomain. So, in Google, subdirectories were already functioning just as well as subdomains for the purposes of keyword rank optimization. (more…)

For many national or regional chain stores, providing dealer-locator services with robust maps, driving directions and proximity search capability is outside of their core competencies, and they frequently choose to outsource that development work or purchase software to enable the service easily.

I did a quick survey and found a number of companies providing dealer locator or store finder functionality: (more…)

GravityStream is a technical solution that provides outsourced search optimization to large, dynamic websites. Automatic SEO, if you will. Here’s what it does…

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I was recently researching some problems that a client was exeriencing due to bad advice given to him by a prior SEO agency (they’d encouraged him to buy links and participate in link exchanges, I found, among other sins). While looking into the site’s problems which included various over-optimizations and bad usability design, I discovered that when I used a particular keyword to search in Google, his site’s homepage came up with a completely different title in the search results. Most of his other desired keywords brought up his HTML <TITLE> text like normal, but this one did not…

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Also, here’s the Image Sharing Sites Comparison Chart that I created while researching out the potential for improving sites’ traffic through integration with social sharing services.

I see that one blogger, Morpheus Media, posted a good bulleted summary of the Images & Search session.

My new company, Netconcepts, does SEO consulting and web development. As I mentioned, the area which I was hired to work upon is some software service that Netconcepts provides which I describe as a near turnkey SEO solution for dynamically generated websites. One area where I do research is in using image sharing sites like Flickr to improve rankings for sites such as online product catalogs which have lots of photographs. Contact me if you’re interested in these services, or if you have any questions about optimizing for image search or through photo sharing services.

The talk focuses primarily upon optimizing via Flickr, since my comparison research indicates that Flickr has the best potential for natural search optimization. You’ll notice that my postings here at Natural Search Blog increasingly have illustrations accompanying them, and I’ve typically hosted those through Flickr just for the SEO value in an effort to “practice what I preach”.

I’ll also be speaking at the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Series on Search Engine Marketing in April (San Francisco), May (New York), and June (Chicago) on the subject of “Organic Search is All About Content”. These one-day conferences will have some other great guests such as Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts, Amanda Camp and Vanessa Fox from Google, Eric Ward the link-building expert, Paul O’Brien from HP, and others.

I hope to see you there!

Read on to see what I mean.

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A group of leading SEOs including Carsten Cumbrowski, Ahmed Bilal, and Rhea Drysdale will review one submission per week delivering a thorough review of usability and site navigation, link building, and copywriting from the perspective of placement in the four leading engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask).

It’s clear though that “free” is as free as having your site criticized in one of the SEO clinics experts like to host at conferences.  If chosen for review, the findings and recommendations will be posted for others to peruse.  I’d do as much myself and appreciate their efforts to help others with these case studies but as a website owner, someone responsible for SEO, or marketing manager for a major brand, I might not be so inclined to have my successes and failures outlined in detail for everyone to see.  That concern aside, I do hope they get some quality sites and develop a thorough library of reviews (perhaps I’ll sign up myself!).

To participate, simply contact the team here.