SoloSEO

Announcing LeaveFeedback.org, Free Service for Local Businesses

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 26th, 2008

I’m excited to announce a new free service I developed for local businesses, LeaveFeedback.org. Local Search is one of the newest verticals in the search industry bringing with it the convergence of offline (local) businesses and online search. LeaveFeedback.org has a real solution to one of the biggest problems facing local businesses: online customer reviews.

Problem: Local businesses have difficulties getting online reviews from offline customers.

Solution: LeaveFeedback.org helps local businesses to get authentic, online reviews from their customers by giving a coupon for leaving feedback at a review site, and pointing the customer directly to one of the review sites.

Benefits: This service not only helps local businesses to increase online customer reviews, but it also gives motivation to local businesses to create business listings at popular local search sites and helps local businesses rank better on sites that use customer ratings as a part of their local search rankings algorithm (like Yahoo! Local).

Businesses with multiple locations or Local Search Marketers can manage multiple businesses from one account.

How LeaveFeedback.org works:

1) Local business fills out sign-up form

2) Local business finds or creates their business listings at local review sites (Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, Yelp.com, etc.)

3) Local business creates a coupon with a code for customer to enter

4) Local business gives customer the coupon (or sends in an email)

5) Customer enters code at LeaveFeedback.org and is directed to one of the review sites of the local business

6) Customer prints off the “thank you page” or actual review and redeems coupon

As a result, local businesses will see an increase in customer reviews, ratings, and local search rankings. And ultimately, more customers!

Some other features of LeaveFeedback.org you’ll find helpful and interesting, but not shouted from the rooftops:

- Print off an actual coupon (4 per page) from an auto-generated PDF
- Create a direct link to a randomly selected local review site for your business
- Keeps track of how many times the coupon was entered and customer went to review site
- Quick links to search for or add your local business to popular local search sites and directories

Some links about Local Search that may help you learn more about it:

10 Likely Factors in Google’s Local Search Algorithm
Mike Blumenthal interview about Local Search
Local Search Marketing Tactics (SES San Jose 2007 Session)
Why Local is Different (SMX West 2008 Session)
Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics

Thanks for the feedback and testing by Mike Blumenthal at Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo! Local, Matt McGee at Small Business SEM, Andy Beal at MarketingPilgrim.com, David Mihm, Miriam at SEO Igloo and Solas Web Design, William Scott at SearchInfluence.com, and Tim Coleman at ConvertOffline.com.

12 comments Visited 4927 times March 26th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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SearchMe.com Breaks the Search Engine Mold

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 18th, 2008

With the SearchMe beta announced last week, and my invitation to participate arriving today, SearchMe.com has arrived to change up the playing field of Search Engines. Will it be successful? I think its new and fresh search engine interface will make a lot of heads turn. Here are 3 areas where SearchMe has broken the traditional mold of a search engine, and may add some new areas of emphasis in the SEO industry.

1) Site design, not page title
For most users, the page title that Google et al. display in the search engine results page (SERPs) is the first “eye-catcher” to draw in a reader and attract attention. Second comes the “description” which is pulled either from the meta tag or content on the page around the search term.

SearchMe.com makes your site the number one focus. Emphasis in terms of search engine optimization now has a design element.

Pages that are spammy (lots of ads), have little content, or an overwhelming menu structure will most likely be skipped. Optimizing your page for SearchMe might include making important text (like a heading) readable at that size to garner attention.

I found myself considering the following: (1) my first impression (good or bad), (2) is the content type what I expected based on my search (lots of product images, lots of content, a video, etc.), and (3) from what I can read does it address what I am looking for (including the page title when that pops open at the bottom of the screenshot).

2) No more Page 1
Instead of having a next page button, you can keep on scrolling for forever (I didn’t get to any end of results after 2 minutes of scrolling, so that’s assumed). This seems inconsequential, but it no longer gives us a “top 10″ results. Obviously the first listings will be seen more, but there is no more defined line.

3) Assumed verticals
Google et al. have different verticals like web search, images, blogs, maps, shopping, books, finance, etc. SearchMe also has verticals, but automatically generate what verticals they assume you are searching for if you would like to narrow your search. When I type in “pizza, st george ut” (a local search type of query), for example, I get “Lodging & Hotels”, then “Restaurants”, “Sales & Bargains”, “Skiing”, and “Dentistry”. Of course they have more verticals than this, and each set is based on what you are typing. Very slick. The other thing I might mention too is that the verticals are actually centered on what I am actively seeking, rather than just having a defined set of verticals that you have to make a decision of relevance on.

I think SearchMe has a great product, and I’m looking forward to the refining of the algorithm, speed, and total index.

4 comments Visited 2806 times March 18th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Free SEO Tool: XML Sitemap Ping Tool

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 10th, 2008

All the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, and Ask) use the XML Sitemaps protocol for getting URLs from websites. Of course they all still use good old-fashioned crawling, but the XML sitemap can be helpful for getting new content indexed quicker and also helping spot errors using other tools the search engines offer. Simply put, if you don’t have an XML sitemap already, we suggest you get one. XML-Sitemaps.com offers a free service that works very well, and you can also download (not free) a version to run on your own server.

As the major search engines all agreed to a protocol (basically Google’s protocol), they also made it easier to let them know when a sitemap has been updated. They let users “PING” them with the URL for the sitemap. This makes it easy to build into software and such, but not necessarily easy to do. So, we thought we’d make it easy to do for you.

Just put in the URL of your sitemap, and then we’ll send it on to all 4 search engines in one big swoop. If there happens to be an error, you’ll get an error message.

You can also check out our other Free SEO Tools like the LinkSearch Tool and IndexRank.

6 comments Visited 5969 times March 10th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Blended Search… Should We Care?

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 5th, 2008

Michael and I had the opportunity to attend the SMX (Search Marketing Expo) last week in sunny Santa Clara, CA. It was a shame to spend those 60-degree days inside, especially since I come from the cold, white Rocky Mountains, and we spend as little time as possible outside this time of year. But for the good of our readership, my poorly educated mind, and to get our money’s worth we suffered through some questionable meals (sorry guys, most of it was inedible), and overly well air-conditioned conferences rooms (where’s my parka?) to gather all the information we could.

From the get go, it was obvious the conference was going to spend much of the time discussing what Danny Sullivan and others are calling “Blended Search.” I am not a big fan of the term “blended search,” it isn’t an accurate descriptive term. In my mind when something is blended, a bunch of ingredients are taken and acted upon to create a new product, with the ingredients of that product not being individually identifiable from that point forward. What we are talking about here is not a blended new search results page, but more like a new look, and a re-organization of information from sources, which were not previously utilized, but where the data remains very much identifiable. Google is calling this mega- results page Universal Search, which is a better term as far as definitions go, since Google is essentially universally searching all their database silos for all the results possible. Essentially, the search engines are now able to draw from more databases at one time and return results from all those queries to us on our results pages. The database sources used by search engines can now include blogs, books, catalogs, programming code, online directories, stock quotes, images, maps, news, video and standard web searches.

So on a so-called blended or universal results page, the searcher could see data from anyone of the above listed sources, organized by relevance, instead of just the page of links and snippets we are used to seeing now. In the past if we wanted to search specific data silo, we had to select Images, Maps, News, Shopping, etc, from the top of the search page, now all those silos can be automatically included.

I personally wonder how much this sort of mega results page will benefit us. My biggest complaint with search now is the shear volume of superfluous garbage we still seem to receive in our SERPs today, so I worry that unless the search algorithm gets drastically better, all these new search results possibilities could potentially just turn out to add to the useless noise and clutter plaguing us now. We shall see.

The most important question to us small business owners becomes, what does this mean to our sites, and how does it change the way we SEO? In short, for now it doesn’t change one thing. In two different sessions representatives of Google made it clear that good, proven SEO strategies are still as important as ever whether is be in web search or universal search pages, so we do not need to change what we are doing (assuming we are doing our SEO right). I think that is the best way to play it, just keep adding the rich content, building natural links, adding popular keywords, and our sites will continue to grow and do well. However, I am concerned with the prospect that we are now going to now need to compete with large companies and other media types for position on the SERPs. For example, if I am an online advertiser for my plumbing services, I don’t want the listing I worked hard to achieve to be replaced by some absurd YouTube plumbing mishap video, or by an image of Miss Plumber America, scantily clad holding a pipe wrench. I want my listing to rightfully stay put… I hope good SEO practices and a more defined and appropriate algorithm protect small business owners, our site’s position, and they continue to provide us with the opportunities to still do well online as Integrated Search becomes more mainstream. We will need to keep a close eye on it, and if we must, we will figure out how to make the new changes work best for us. I am sure Michael could make us some sort of another helpful tool. ☺

Add comment Visited 1677 times March 5th, 2008 Aaron R Stewart

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What’s New with Yahoo! and Google

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 4th, 2008

Some exciting things have been happening in the world of search.

At SMX West last week, Yahoo! announced their Open Search Platform. This was the talk of the town at SMX, and a novel idea from Yahoo. Basically, instead of just being able to somewhat control your search engine snippet with your title tag and description meta tag, later this year you will be able to customize what is shown, such as ratings, reviews, site links (like Google does now), an image, address, contact info, and more. Here is an example from the Yahoo Search Blog.

Before

After

Obviously if you are on the front page we’re going to see a skewing of what the normal percentages of users click on, because it’s going to stand out and be very functional and user friendly. Great move for Yahoo! too in empowering even the small business to stand out from the crowd and take search to a new level. Obviously Microsoft hasn’t taken over Yahoo! yet.

On the Google front, several sites have reported Google adding another element to their Universal search, with a site search box right in the SERPs. Check this out:

Pretty handy and pretty interesting. I couldn’t duplicate it myself interestingly, it’s probably a limited data center roll out. I do find it interesting seeming Amazon has their own search, A9 search, which I haven’t heard mentioned for a long time. Of course it’s not really a search engine, more of a search aggregator.

I’ll put together the highlights of SMX and post that later this week, in case you missed it or don’t want to read through the liveblogs (they’re actually pretty good).

Add comment Visited 2928 times March 4th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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