Customer: “How can I get higher placement in search engines?”

“Really pay attention to the words you are using to define your brand. Get creative, I mean you’ll never rank with generic keywords such online marketing or local house painters. Also be sure you include words that give your geographic location and don’t forget to include variations of your words since people are always misspelling their searches.

Customer: “Ok I can do that, anything else?”

“Yes, there are about 4 other things you can do. Is your website spider friendly?”

Customer: “I think so but I’m not exactly clear on what that means.”

“Two things; steer clear of Flash, Java, frames and DHTML and most importantly make your site clearly named, easy to navigate with correct HTML and no broken links. By clearly named I mean fixing the file names that your pages use to represent a searchable keyword like Ferrari.com/F40/racing-history. This will allow spiders to more easily navigate your entire site for proper indexing.”

Customer: “Thank you, that helps a lot. Next?”

“Many people believe, as do I, that your TITTLE tag is one of the most important aspects in ranking higher with a search engine’s algorithms. So instead of a tag that reads Bob’s Boat’s put in something along the lines of Bob’s Boats – #1 Boating Super Store in SoCal.

Customer: Actually a friend told me about this so I have done that.”

“Good. The last two aspects you must address are content and incoming links. Obviously the key here is as much content as you possibly can but remember it must still be very clear, concise, easily searchable and maintain keyword density so don’t write jumbled, incoherent content and think it’s going to help because it won’t. It will actually hurt your rankings. Finally, make sure that every site out there that needs to know about you does. Of course stick with industry specific and relevant directories and do not get involved with any link schemes.

Customer: “Got it.”

“Ok, well these 5 tools should give you a good start with helping you achieve higher rankings so good luck.”

Customer: “Thank you so much.”

At Softline we work with allot of small and medium size business’s so we are quite familiar with the fact that there audience may not be as geographically diverse as larger companies. In fact, a common question that comes up in our conversations with prospective clients is ” Why should I do SEO when my clients are local? “. Thats a pretty good question and opens the door into a short discussion about Local Search Engine Optimization trends and how its become much easier to optimize locally and really target an audience.

Local optimization of websites has picked up steam as of late. While the concept is nothing new the technology that allows marketers to more effectively target their audience has improved considerably. You may think that Google, Yahoo, & MSN are leading the way on this but you will be amazed at the number of specialized search engines that have popped up that while by them selves have very little market share in search, collectively have a lead on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. These smaller search engines are designed specifically for the local market and have been gaining surprising traction. The top tier search engines havent been standing still either and have started to improve their own local search abilities with Google leading the charge.

So why is it important for small business to look at SEO? Now more than ever all business’s small and large are looking online to drive more sales and traffic to their stores and websites. The fact is that more and more people are going online to search for local business versus using the big yellow book and at this point in the game its not a matter of not being able to afford SEO services its simply something you have to do to stay in line with competition.

At Softline we specialize in local optimization services for the Southern California area since this is where we are located but have clients nationwide that we will with targeted services. The hardest challenge is always showing a small or medium size business the value in this type of marketing and why they should consider it. We have found that a multi-tiered approach to optimizing locally has worked the best utilizing organinc SEO for long term results and Paid Search management for short term traffic and sales.

So with that said Local SEO services are kicking into high gear and many more companies are looking to this service to increase their company’s visibility. Online marketing makes sense and diverting some of the marketing dollar to online which provides a truly measurable way to see results is a smart move.