Otherwise, anyone including your competitor can claim your Google Local Listing and hijack the account. The hijacker finds the listing they want and change it. The hijacker can change your business name,address, url, categories, description and telephone number. Your website or phone number is hijacked so customers trying to reach you get someone else. This causes lost sales to the real Google Local Listing owner and frustration.

How does web traffic reflect your web site rank?

Traffic has a direct impact to your web site’s rank among Google search results. The higher the rank, the more traffic you get. There are specific algorithms that Google and other search engines use to rank web sites, which are secretly guarded. Google uses over 200 ranking factors. SEO involves tailoring your website to ranking criteria.

Ranking algorithms is the part of the search engine that decides which pages show up at the top of the results list. Organic ranking is complicated. Ranking algorithm is the mathematical formula a search engine uses to score page against the query to see which pages are the closest matches.

The two main factors are page factors and query factors.

Page factors- Web search ranking algorithms rely heavily on components that have nothing to do with query entered.
1. Strength of links to a page
2. Number of visits to the page and more
These factors boost the rankings for searches on any word that occurs on that page.

Query Factors – The query that the search enters weighs heavily. The number of occurrences of words in the query, where they are found on the page, title, and body. Other elements are weighed in the search engines regarding rankings.

Google tags costs $25 a month, kind of steep for a little yellow tag (see above.) The question is, will Tags allow you to make more than $25 a month. If so, then Tags is worth your investment. If not, it is probably not a good idea.

How do you know if you will bring in more than $25 a month from Tags? This depends on your business. For example, say you sell sandwiches. If you give a 10% off coupon through tags, and you spend $25 a month, you will need to sell at least $25 worth of discounted sandwiches to break even. If your sandwiches are around $5, then you will need to sell at least five sandwiches throughout the month, solely from Tags to break even.

Other businesses may fare better. For example, say you paint houses. If you give a %10 off coupon on Tags, and you normally charge around $1000 for an average house, then you will make a profit. The cost of Tags and the cost of the discount still means you are getting $875 for that sales, and then minus the labor, supplies, etc, you will still be making a profit.

Tags is a great opportunity for businesses to get more visibility in Google Maps, but this alone will not get you more sales. You should have an appealing product/service, and having a website that sells will also help greatly. I would recommend you try the Tags free 14 day trial, and see if you get a response. If so, keep using the service and refining your methods. If not, then you will really have to think if Tags fits into your business objectives, and if you are selling effectively.

Search marketers still drop links in blog comments as a way to get links. This method is considered blog spamming. To combat this, Google uses a nofollow link tags (a signal to search engine spiders to ignore a link) and devalue links in blog comments.

Search engine submission has also become unnecessary. Google has the ability to discover and index content. Search engine submission is obsolete and waste of money, not to mention automatically submitting your sites can hurt their rankings.

Unethical site owners and SEOs abuse META keywords by including misleading unrelated keywords to their content. Google ignores the keyword tag due to unethical practices.

Web site owners who practice in link exchange schemes that intentionally influence rankings is a violation of Google. Avoid methods such as link farms,off-topic links, and do not rely heavily on reciprocal links and paid links. These methods will get you penalized by the search engines.

In conclusion, do not practice unethical seo tactics. Unethical seo tactics will get your website penalized by the search engines.

Watch Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp founder explain News Corp Sites May Be Removed From Google click www.youtube.com/watch?v=sewucH3rOPM

This can be monumental if approved. This can lead to other media companies following News Corp’s path. Bing could leverage content access rights to challenge Google.

Whenever you search Google for some type of business near a certain area, not only does it query its usual web results and AdWords database, it also queries its Google Local database.

Google’s Local Business Center Listings are the information that appears when someone search Google, Google Maps, Mobile, or Google 411. And that information, which can fill the same purpose of an ad, is absolutely free.

You may be wondering why Google gives this away for free? When asked this question, John Hanke, president of Google Earth, responded “It makes our search results more accurate.” Google’s goal, Hanke explained, is to be the source of people’s information. To do that, Google needs reliable data.

If you are like many businesses, you may be paying a hefty price for an ad in yellow pages. But if someone uses Google/Google Maps, or calls 800-GOOG411 for information instead of the Yellow pages (and ask anyone under 35 when the last time they used Yellow Pages was), they may find the name of your company, a little bit of info, and next to it, the words “More Info.” Google gathers as much as they can about business from many sources, but that information may be inaccurate or out of date.

If your information is displayed in Google Local already, why not take control of it? And if not, why not get your information up there?

To start, go to www.google.com/localbusinesscenter. “Claim your listing if your business is listed or add it if not. To confirm that you are actually the business owner, Google with either call you or send you a postcard (you get to choose which). You’ll be given a PIN number (write it down) and then can edit your company information.

You can choose a number of categories to describe your listing and make it more likely for searchers to find you. If your a graphic designer, you might choose categories such as “graphic designer,” “web designer,” “marketing collateral.”

We would recommend at least every business owner add at least this basic amount of information. You can also add photos (of logos, products, services, your datacenter, etc), coupons, products, services, etc.

Google’s Business Center provides you with a dashboard to see how people are finding your listing. It shows where people are coming from – figuratively, and literally. You can see which keywords people use to locate you, and where they are searching from geographically.

This services is almost getting a free AdWords ad, so take advantage of it ASAP.

In our previous blog posts, we discussed search engine optimization.   Search Engine Optimization is a long-term process.    A great online marketing method to use in combination with search engine optimization is pay per click advertising. Pay per click advertising is a search engine marketing method used to increase traffic to your web site and increase return on investment.

According to the research firm eMarketer Inc., Google already holds about 75 percent of the $11 billion search advertising market in the United States, with Yahoo! in a distant second at 9 percent,

Pay per click marketing you can either do yourself or hire a company to do it for you.   By doing yourself, allow for a learning curve and visit http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/. If you hire a search engine marketing company, find out their experience level in the program.Find out what the search engine marketing company offers and their plans with your account.

How do you generate immediate traffic to your website, and increase marketing ROI? The answer is pay per click advertising. Pay Per Click Marketing is Recession Proof. Pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords is the most efficient return on investment. According to Google Adwords, each month approximately 80% of Internet users in the United States and hundreds of millions more worldwide view Adwords ads. The marketer can change campaigns, ads, add keywords very quickly as opposed to traditional marketing. The process is based on quality, relevancy, click through rate, keyword performance, landing page load time, and bidding. For instance, by improving your quality score, it reduces the minimum bids and ad rank goes up.

Pay per click marketing such as Google Adwords is the most cost effective in a recession because the advertiser sets the daily budget, target the ads regionally or nationally. For instance Google Adwords allows the advertiser to pick the time of the day to run the ads. The pay per click is flexible because you make changes and the changes can be up within 15 minutes. Pay per click marketing programs allows marketers to choose what to spend.   The advertiser is only charged when someone clicks on the ads.

Pay per click advertising is easier to measure results and the leads are better than traditional marketing.  People on the web are searching for your specific products and services so the leads are more relevant.  In addition, there is code from Google Analytics that you put in the body of each web page that shows your performance.  Traditional marketing is for a general audience and not all of the audience is interested in your products or services.  In addition, it is harder to measure the results from traditional marketing.  Traditional marketing is more expensive.  For example, a New Haven Yellow Page Ad Full Page Full Color costs $31,176 a year.  Do you think that it is worth spending on the Yellow Pages?   How many of you use the phone book?  The amount of money for the Yellow Pages would be better off spent on your web site and your pay per click advertising.  Moreover, Pay per click marketing generates immediate traffic to your website, and increases return on investment.