The new features might also reveal some secrets of Google Maps ranking factors. It’s definitely a space that’s well worth watching for local search marketing experts.

Some business directories and data aggregators contain huge percentages of bad listings including gone-out-of-business companies and duplicated listings. Pankaj Mathur of InfoUSA recently estimated that some sources such as Dunn & Bradstreet, Acxiom, Localeze and Google Maps might contain 17-to-18-million records, or up to 4 million more records than actual, live businesses! That’s as much as a 28.6% error rate!

I know from experience that some percentage of a business directory’s bloat can be caused by inability to figure out if a business has closed up for good or not (most data sources are not set up to verify each individual business, although InfoUSA remains an example of the gold standard, relying on a practice of phoning each and every business to verify it’s viability at least once per year, and also using a number of other signals of possible closure). These old, dead business listings clog up a great many online directories and can result in poor usability when consumers attempt to drive to their doorsteps for products or services.

However, another source of bloat is in the form of duplicate listings, and as a search engine marketer, it’s these duplicate listings that my clients sometimes have which concern me highly. Just as with duplicate webpages in regular SEO, duplicate listings in business directories and within Google Maps can potentially dilute down a company’s possible ranking score, resulting in lower overall rankings and poorer online performance.

Back in February, Google and other search engines jointly announced support of a canonical tag for webpages, enabling webmasters to specify which page URL should be treated as the main/authoritative one for search engine indexing in cases where multiple URL variations could occur.

If such a protocol makes sense for the general web search engines, why not a protocol to assist in reducing dupes in local search, too?

Google Maps help suggests that users can help them identify cases of duplicate listings, but the problem is that dupes may be constantly coming in through all of Google’s various data partners.

At the recent Kelsey Conference, local directory industry experts predict that Cost-Per-Call is increasingly going to become a dominant pricing model and this will mainly happen through individual directories displaying different tracking phone numbers for the same businesses – and all these different channels with separate phones feed into Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Bing Maps, and other local search engines. So, potential issues from many various phone numbers could be increasing.

Tracking phone numbers are not the only potential problem – sometimes a company’s alternate phone numbers and fax numbers will get parsed off into separate business listings, causing further instances of duplication.

So, how could this “Canonical Phone Tag” effectively be accomplished? hCard Microformat already provides a framework for doing something like this. A canonical phone tag could be formed like this:

<abbr class=”tel” title=”000.867.5309″>000.123.4567</abbr>

In this example, webpage users could see the “000.123.4567″ tracking phone number when they view the webpage, and the machines could instead glean the authoritative, canonical phone number for the business, “000.867.5309″, and ignore the tracking number.

So, is this a solution in search of a problem?

How many of you have encountered instances where a tracking phone number has gotten indexed in a separate listing alongside a business’s primary phone number/listing? If so, this solution may be worthwhile to consider in keeping all of a business’s ranking weight combined in one listing as opposed to distributed across many.

These tips are easy to implement and will suit a majority of the businesses on the web. With paid traffic getting more expensive with each passing day (and yet providing only 12% of traffic on the web), it is high time all website owners started ramping up their organic seo efforts. These tips will certainly help in improving a site’s natural search visibility which still accounts for 88% of the traffic on the web.

There are a few proprietary tools (created by SEOMoz) that are mentioned in the post. These tools do a great job of automating the mundane tasks thus saving valuable time and giving great results to help you plan your strategy. You have to be a paid PRO member to access these tools.

1) Request for a link in customer communications:
There are many opportunities arising in the course of a site owner communicating with a customer in the entire buying cycle. In your emails, you will be well advised to ask for a link in a courteous manner.

It could read – “If you have a website or blog, we would appreciate if you could link to us by copying this code Anchor text that suits your business.”
NOTE:
a) Vary the anchor text subtly in your emails
b) If possible, get links to your inner money pages

2) Use of Top Pages Tool To Identify Competitor’s Backlinks:
The Top Pages tool is a great way to see your competitor’s backlinks by just plugging in their site URL. The screenshot below helps you get an idea.

You can then create suitable linkbait that can attract links from those sites that are already linking to your competitor. Else, you can email the powerful domain owners and request for a link after you have referenced their site post or article on your own blog or your site. This will help answer the other domain owner’s question – “What is in it for me?” and thus incentivize her to link to your site.

3) Use Adwords Tool To Find Keywords That Have High Search Volume And Low Competition:
Many of us are prone to miss the obvious Adams in many things we do in life. This point is a classic example. In most cases, these money keywords are long tail keywords that can be optimised through on page factors and made to rank well in the major search engines.

A search for pet collar using the Adwords keyword tool results in the following screenshot:

The term

pet collar supplies

has a search volume of 49500 with limited advertiser competition. If your site is in the pet industry business, this will be a good keyword to target.

4) Use of Top Pages Tool To Find Linking Pages To Your Domain That Need A Redirect:
The Top Pages tool mentioned in (2) above is very useful to identify links from external sites to pages on your domain that are currently maybe showing a 404 Error or temporary redirects etc, whatever the case maybe.

You can then use 301 redirects to preserve and forward the inherent link juice on such pages to the latest updated versions on your site. I am reproducing a screenshot of the original post which clearly explains what I have written.

If you are the site owner, then the access to Google Webmaster Central will help you identify the 404 pages. It can be a problem if you are doing research for a potential client.

There is another instance where an entire domain has been 301 redirected to a new domain. If the old domain had pages with 404 errors, then a 301 redirect to them is still going to show up as 404 errors as far as Google is concerned. These are lost pages and will not show up in the Webmaster Tools when the new domain is analyzed.

But Top Pages tool does show up these lost pages. It is invaluable data to rectify the lost pages and gain their link juice by 301 ing them to the appropriate pages on the new domain.

5) Competitive Link Finder Tool To Build Your Site External Profile:
The new Competitive Link Finder tool released by SEOmoz is a powerful aid that helps you identify the linking sites that link to multiple competitors in your industry.

You have to plug in your site URL and atleast three of your competitor sites to get the best results. You can always email such domains that link to your industry competitors and get a link to your site as well.

6) Optimize Your Google Local Listings:
Google local listings are a huge asset for any business to be listed on the first page for the most representative search phrase of their industry. It is helpful if the business is physically located close to the city.

I have found that a good local backlink profile boosts a site on Google local search. This can be achieved by submitting to local directories and other businesses in the same local geographical location in which the business operates.

David Mihm is an authority on local search issues and his points at the SEOMoz Pro Conference are outlined below:
a) Claim your local listing on Google (even if you make a multiple submit). This is given more value by Google than a bulk upload that is susceptible to spam.

b) Use keywords in the business title when submitting a local listing. Avoid keyword stuffing the title.

c) Add custom categories that your business offers. This can be a helpful ranking factor. Use the maximum number of permitted custom categories.

d) Citations are the links of Google Local rankings. Get listed on Localeze, InfoUSA, Openlist.com, etc. Americans should check out this list of places to get citations

Others should check out David’s guides to citations in Canada, UK Citations, Citations in Australia and Continental Europe Citations

You can use the search engines to find even more citation sources:

• yourcity, st blog
• yourcity, st directory
• yourindustry, st blog
• yourindustry, st directory
• yourindustry yourcity, st blog
• yourindustry yourstate directory

7)Buyind paid advertisements on Google Content Network:
There is a tip on buying advertisements on sites listed on the Google Content Network. Sites listed there are maximising their revenue through Adsense and would be more open to paid link advertisements. It is each individual site owner’s call whether to adopt this strategy or not.

8. Increase Link Love By Becoming A Green Business:
If a business goes green online, it is a good way of attracting links from authoritative domains. There are many sites like Ethical Directory, EcoFirms.org, Guide Me Green etc willing to give your site a link provided it is a green one. This also reflects on a business owner’s willingness to be eco friendly. With global warming taking centerstage, this issue is all the more vital.

9) Work on Your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
A good majority amongst us (especially in the SEO industry) are obsessed with rankings and traffic. Conversion of visitors into paid customers often takes a backseat. Ben Jesson’s CRO presentation provided a wealth of information and lot of food for thought.

You could make a good start by learning your customers’ needs once they land on your site. This can be done by implementing tools on your website from which you can learn what your customers are looking for.

Get some unbiased feedback from other folks who are not your friends or relatives. The more the site is torn to shreds, the better it is as an eye opener for you to take instant remedial action. A good list of tools for learning from your customers are:

• GoogleTalk Chatback (I just added this to my site and it is super easy to implement)
• Tell-a-Friend-King
• Kampyle
• iPerceptions 4Q
• Distilled Reputation Monitor
• CrazyEgg (I have used this, and it rocks)
• SurveyMonkey
• Ethnio
• ClickTale
• Google Website Optimizer

You would be well off checking these great Conversion rate optimization articles and sign up for the newsletter on their site.

10) Seth’s Marketing Opportunity Calculator:
To help you in your sales pitch efforts, it is worth your effort in taking a look at Seth’s Marketing Opportunity calulator. You can download his slides and spreadsheets at How to Win SEO Budget and Influence your CMO

Whitespark’s entire post titled 10 Valuable, Actionable, Take-Aways From the SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar is a great read on which this post is based.

My post titled Next Frontier In Search Marketing gives the traffic figures for seo and ppc.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company offering both natural search and Auckland pay per click marketing services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

With the advent of Rich Snippets in SERPs, I think I can safely declare that Microformats have now hit mainstream! Google is now presenting listings of pages with hReview microformat with slightly more attention-getting “bling”:

This will undoubtedly result in slightly higher clickthrough rates for those listings.

Any day, Google could add in special display treatments for pages that sport hCard or hCalendar microformatting, so companies that haven’t implemented these simple, semantic mark-up protocols will have missed the bus!

Be sure to check out Alan Rimm-Kaufman’s blog post on how Google Rich Snippets may soon give advantage to pages coded with hProduct microformat — internet retailers should pay attention. (As a side note, I previously helped some lucky internet retailer 500 sites optimize their store locators by adding hCard Microformats through GravityStream, back when I still worked for Netconcepts — so, at least a few IR 500 sites have enjoyed Microformatting before!)

Yet, a great many sites continue to miss this vital key to relevance, and they wonder why they fail at ranking for their most apropos keywords. Keywords for which they’d otherwise have a very good chance at ranking upon!

W3C calls the TITLE the “most important element of a quality web page”

Yesterday I reviewed another major retailer website which had their brandname embedded in their page titles — and nothing else. Thousands of product pages all had identical TITLEs! This company could’ve had top three rankings on a great many competitive keyword phrases had they only customized their TITLE tags very slightly.

The W3C calls the <TITLE> tag “the most important element of a quality Web page.” Google has apparently paid attention to that, and all of the search engines have placed especial weighting upon the words found within page titles when evaluating the topics for which a webpage is associated.

It makes sense, when you think about it. A title should be a super-concentrated blurb that tells a user what a page is all about. In search engines, the title is often also displayed as the link text for each of the pages listed in the search engine results page listings. Informative titles appearing in SERP listings will get clicked upon more as users are reassured that the page they’re clicking upon is what they’re actually seeking. A page with an informative title will get clicked upon far more likely than a vague or unrelated page title.

I heard Googler Amanda Camp once mention that she’d recommended to a friend of hers to customized a page title, focusing it upon the main topic keywords for the webpage, and it immediately began ranking in the very first position for the keyword phrase.

And, I’ve seen it many times myself — engineer a good, simple, appropriate, keyword-rich title tag, and your page can  zoom its way above all the other nonoptimal page listings for the very same term.

The town of “Eu” in France has been edged out of search rankings for the term, since other pages about the European Union are ranking higher. According to them, they’re missing out on a lot of tourism because individuals simply cannot find information about them.

I’ve previously blogged in Ultimate Local SEO Tactics a tongue-in-cheek post recommending changing a town’s name for search optimization purposes, but I didn’t think it would actually happen!

Now, I’d say they possibly could save some money/trouble by first hiring some SEOs to try to help them rank for the term. For instance, it might be possible to get the Wikipedia page for Eu to rank on the first page.

In fact, I’ll call for a bit of generous community action here – why don’t all you other local SEO’s out there blog about this city and link to their Wikipedia page as well?  Let’s help that poor town out!

Decider brings local business listings for bars, restaurants, music venues, events, and reviews. It appears to be targeted to the college-to-early-thirties demographic, and sports advertisements on the pages.

When I heard about Decider, I immediately though, “oh, yet another business directory site among the many others,” — a thought apparently shared to some degree by Andrew Shotland.

Yet, I don’t think local search has hit a point of “critical mass” like the largest point of expansion just before an industry’s bubble is about to burst. While I do believe that there is likely to be some collapsing of the businesses at the top of the local directory food chain like major yellow pages, the cheapness of launching local businesses at the bottom of the equation virtually guarantees that there will continue to be many more contenders continuing to enter with their own takes on the local search experience. The barriers to entry for launching a local directory are quite low, and various related local info APIs cause the barrier to reduce even more.

Greg Sterling points out that The Onion’s intro into local directory space isn’t all that surprising, since they are a type of newspaper — though, newspapers have also been struggling to get up to competitive speed in the internet age.

Oh, and I should also take a moment to point out that Decider has been fairly savvy in trying to construct a site that is very search-engine friendly. Their developers have obviously worked to incorporate SEO elements into the construction. Page titles are pretty well-formed, along with Meta tags and H1s. Page URLs are very spider-friendly and include keywords.

They even get a special place in my heart for incorporating hCard microformatting elements, although I’m not convinced that their microformat code is valid — the hCard stuff isn’t recognized by my Operator toolbar in FireFox, so I think they may’ve set the hCard up in an invalid manner, perhaps.

Australian Yellow Pages in Google results (click to enlarge)

Amusingly, Lifehacker mentions, “The fact that it was ever blocked is frankly one of the weirdest Internet strategies imaginable, but that’s another story.”

I can well remember back when Superpages allowed me to optimize the yellow pages content — it’s so gratifying to see the dramatic traffic increase that occurs when a site that has blocked content is suddenly opened up for spidering and indexing. Sensis will undoubtedly enjoy a similar punch up in traffic now, and their clients will benefit from the added visibility, too.

Why did they block Google for so long? Could be simple ignorance, or it could have been the continued use of a Business 1.0 strategy. For one thing, internet yellow pages sites are huge targets for dataminers who harvest listing information for re-use in many ways, including spamming of email addresses, composing telemarketing phone number lists, as well as building competing directory information sites.

Google could have been blocked automatically as a seeming dataminer. Heck, they ARE dataminers of a sort, but most of us in the search marketing profession have taken to viewing them as benign/beneficial dataminers. It’s the difference between parasites and symbiotic organisms.

Lifehacker goes on to say that they’re skeptical about Sensis’ claims that businesses businesses listed in their yellow pages will get more visibility in Google SERPs. Actually, this is true, if Sensis does all their search engine optimization (“SEO”) correctly. To take it to the next level, Sensis will have to not just open up to the bots but also perform additional Local SEO.

(Coincidentally,  and even more amusingly, Sensis’ General Manager of Online Search and Directories is also named “Chris Smith”. Yes, I grudgingly admit it — my cloning project has been humming along, and I now have successfully accomplished being in more than one place at a time so that I can do SEO for multiple companies simultaneously.)

As he mentioned, I’d previously listed this idea in my somewhat tongue-in-cheek post on “Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics” some time back.

While my Tactics were intended to be a bit over-the-top, the tactic is indeed likely to work to varying degrees in different search engines and internet yellow pages directories, as Mike outlines. I should note that I only endorse the engineering of business names for purposes of branding and for purposes of targeting business-category/product/service terms for which the company involved is actually providing.

I’m not big on throwing away a brandname completely, even if it contains no good keywords — I’m more in favor of adding keywords to the existing business name in a meaningful way. For example, a business named “Xymax Corp” might rename themselves to include their product name: “Xymax Corp Rubber Seals”. This would be good for the business, good for the consumer, and therefor good for the search engine, too.

As Mike aptly outlines, there are a number of other considerations beyond just optimizing for search, such as creating a beneficial image to the company, and building towards longterm customer retention. If you used too fly-by-night a sounding business name, you could expect fewer clickthroughs per search rates than if you used more conservative, reassuring names. So, it would be easy to damage your performance to some degree by mucking this up — you could increase the amount of times your business listing comes up in searches, but simultaneously decrease your click-through-rates.

Mike further states that one should approach business renaming with great care, and I wholeheartedly agree. If you’re not a professional in local search optimization, you might just shoot yourself in the foot. But, with thoughtful deliberation on the multiple factors involved, doing a rename to add in some valuable keyword(s) could improve your referral rates from search engines.

For instance, search for something like “fossil watches” and compare with “Fossil Watches”, and you’ll see that a few of the listings in the SERPs trade ranking positions:

(click to enlarge)

In the example screen-grab above, you’ll see that the lower-case search for “fossil watches” on the left side, has the site “jomashop.com” in the fifth position while a Wikipedia article is in the fifth position on the righthand example search in upper-case for “Fossil Watches”.

In another example search for “Chicago Hotels”, hotels.com and marriott.com trade out for the fourth position in the natural search results below the local one-box, with uppercase “Chicago Hotels” on the left and lowercase “chicago hotels” on the right:

(click to enlarge)

Searching for “Chicago hotels” seems to result in the same rankings as the all lower-case query.

As Search Engine Roundtable mentions, Google states that their search results are not case-sensitive:

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

I now get different results in the 8th position for “george washington” vs. “George Washington” vs. “gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN”, when I expand out the number of listings per page in my preferences.

I was inclined to think that this might be an error due to the recent “Update Dewey” algorithm change that Matt Cutt requested feedback upon, so I reported it to Google, but have not heard back from them.

If this continues much longer, I think that SEOs will likely start doing all sorts of case-sensitive keyword research and optimization based off of it.