It’s no secret that newspapers have been struggling with the disruptive innovations introduced by the internet, and this has resulted in some level of accusation towards Google and a circling-of-the-wagons mentality by the industry. But, what if they were to go in the opposite direction, with fuller engagement? Here’s one tactic for how to go about it via SEO.

In the last few years, I’ve visited a lot of newspaper websites for various projects. These sites are most frequently the online arms of what were once strictly printed local newspapers. When visiting these sites, I’ve been struck by the technical clunkiness of most—they’re typified by poor usability, layouts still closely influenced by traditional print newspaper layouts, dysfunctional on-site search engines, and content management systems hamstrung with badly-formed page templates.

Naturally, these sites are not optimized for search engines nor to make their content readily findable via search. It’s unsurprising that the sites are search-unfriendly. The newspapers probably feel highly conflicted in regards to search—the nostalgic desire for successes experienced in the past have made them grow unhappy with the internet paradigm, and they’ve worked each other up into a frenzy to hold Google responsible for their troubles. It’s hard to expressly invite a perceived enemy into your house on one hand while issuing invective against him on the other.

(I have also encountered newspaper sites which have optimized by some degree. But, these seem fairly few, and even some of them have only taken faltering steps in that direction. The exceptions are some of the biggest players such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and other juggernaut newspapers—which are doing professional jobs at optimization.)

I’m very sympathetic to the dilemma newspapers are experiencing. I recall a time not long back when newspapers felt that internet yellow pages companies (”IYPs”) were as much of a threat as Google (see Local Media Face Growing Threat from Local Search Competitors Like Google, Overture and Yellow Pages, New AIM Group Study Reports and Search Engines Make Local Landgrabs, Leave Newspapers Out In the Cold), back when yellow pages companies had a considerable head-start over newspapers in online engagement and ad sales.

Since I used to work at an IYP, I also experienced firsthand what it was like to see a veteran print industry work to evolve to fit in the changing landscape while still being influenced strongly by legacy technologies. Technology wasn’t the only issue: organizational resistance toward seeing where things were headed, or even relatively insightful observations that there might be a risk in not engaging more aggressively also held the IYPs back. Since newspapers perceived the threat beginning such a long time ago, it’s disheartening to see that as a whole they have struggled to develop an effective adaptation for online—particularly the smaller, local market papers.

So, what’s to be done?

While there are a great many areas where online newspaper sites might improve and increase revenue prospects, one of the greatest untapped potentials on newspaper sites in my opinion is the news archive section. Even among poorly optimized newspaper sites, some articles may vanish into a walled-garden archive section at some point, going dark for search engines. Combined with very poor on-site search utilities, it’s as though these articles don’t exist at all for consumers.

I can’t count how many different newspaper sites I’ve visited where I’ve searched for articles which I knew existed, yet the on-site search engines could not locate them. In some cases, the “live” sites had search engines separate from archive search, yet offered no explanation to users as to which should be used and in what cases. Do articles pass into archive after one year? Two? Three? Why can’t the on-site search show them, regardless? In many other cases I’ve found articles by searching in Google, but the article is no longer available when I click through to the newspaper site, and searching within the site fails to reveal it. Did the article “expire” and pass into the archive graveyard or something? No messaging on the resulting error pages reveals this, nor suggests viable means for locating the article.

Newspaper folks: this is your main product! It’s all well and good to try to keep Google from making everything free and putting you out of business, but at this point there’s an even greater danger in locking away your content to the point where online consumers cannot even find—if a searcher doesn’t even know it exists, it’s certain they won’t be engaging with your site to try to obtain it, regardless of whether it’s provided “free” in return for ad impressions, in exchange for “free registration” or provided in return for some subscription fee.

How many articles are locked away in these old archives?!? It surely varies from newspaper to newspaper, but the potential numbers are staggering. While clicks on pay-per-click ads on newspaper sites may add up slowly, there’s no doubt in my mind that if newspapers dramatically expanded the content they have available to search engines, the clicks and associated revenue would increase. These newspapers must not realize the potential they’re sitting upon!

I acknowledge that current news is going to be the more popular content on newspaper sites, but there’s likely at least half as much traffic potential in the legacy content under the theory of the long tail. According to that theory when applied to newspaper website traffic, yes, there’s far more visits per contemporary news story than past ones, but the cumulative traffic from thousands and thousands of past news stories can equal or dwarf the traffic from the more popular stuff.

So, how should news archives be optimized for search?

Here are a few tips to get you started:

Optimize titles & headlines. This is one area where newspapers should utterly dominate! Reporters and editors often write beautiful article headlines which succinctly describe the topic and grab readers’ attention. But, the headline prose is squandered on some newspaper sites which either repeat the newspaper’s name for the TITLE text of all pages, or cram it up with the date, newspaper name and other “branding” messaging before the article title.

This amounts to almost criminal misuse of the title tag. The title is often the link text that’s displayed in search engine results when pages on your site are found to match the search term, and it’s displayed at the top of the browser window when a user visits the page. Also, in HTML there is a particular tag called the “heading” which is intended for just what it sounds like—used as way of identifying the heading and subheadings on a page, and it should be used when displaying article headlines. There are six different heading tags available (each uses different font attributes to add or decrease emphasis), but the main one you need to know is the <h1>, which is perfect for use in displaying an article’s headline on the page. The article headline should also appear at the beginning, not end, of title tags, and be displayed in H1 tags on the page for best usability and search engine friendliness.

Link to all of your content. To this day, search engines still rely heavily on links to pages to discover and index content. For good usability and crawability, I recommend designing a hierarchy of pages on your site so that users may click from the homepage to a page which provides a short list of top level links (such as links by dates or category of type of news story). Those top level links can link down to subcategory pages which link down further to each article ever published by your newspaper. Such a hierarchy of links is mainly for human site users to navigate down into all of your content, but it also helps the search engines understand the site structure, apply relative priority weighting of pages, and also to semantically categorize content.

Create and actively maintain sitemaps. Although the category pages I mentioned above are often loosely referred to as sitemaps, “official” sitemaps files (those created using a formal standard acknowledged by all of the major search engines) are lists of links to your pages that search engines use find all of your content. These should be used in conjunction with the hierarchy of links provided for human users. The sitemaps help insure that the search engines can find all of your pages.

Focus on creating evergreen URLs. Search engines tend to respect pages that have been around for a long while, and frequently changing the physical location of pages confuses both users and search engines alike. So, try to design article URLs which remain stable when an article is pubbed all the way through to when it’s archived for the long term. People also tend to link to articles, which helps search engines to decide how popular a page is. If you change the URL, then the link “votes” for popularity will no longer point to your article.

If you must change URLs, use 301 redirects. If your system is full of legacy processes which require you to change article page URLs once a current news article is moved off into the archive, then at least redirect the original URL to the final location instead of just delivering up an error page. Most users who click through won’t stop to poke around to try to find where something was shifted-to—they’ll just abandon your site to try to find info elsewhere. And, that redirection command should be a 301 “permanent” redirection in order to insure the search engines apply the original URL’s popularity weighting to the new URL.

Offer a “first click free” option. For those newspapers which require registration or subscription prior to showing archive content, read up on Google’s “First Click Free” program. This process allows Google to crawl your site content and index it, and a person who clicks through from Google can view and read the first page for free, but you can then require payment or registration for subsequent pages.

Create a subscription designation with Google. If you set it up with them, Google will allow you to have content crawled, but when users click through they must pay or register to see any of the article. This is less-preferred by Google since it’s a less satisfactory user-experience. If going this route, I’d recommend displaying a good-sized chunk of the article to users that click through, as a preview. In that way, they’ll feel a little less disappointed, and may be drawn in further to pay a subscription to see more.

Improve on-site search Just as a usability matter, consider using Google’s site search if your internal site search doesn’t work well. Once the pages have been optimized as I’ve outlined above, you could implement Google site search and perhaps improve your site’s overall usability.

There are certainly many other areas for optimization for newspapers, and this is not an exhaustive list of SEO improvements which could be done for articles. Simply exposing hidden and non-indexed archives would be a good start.

Google is trying to find additional ways in which to help the newspaper industry, such as its plan to roll out a micropayment system within a year. Micropayment is FAR better, in my opinion, than attempting to require someone to purchase a month-long or yearly subscription when they might want to access only a single article. I’d also suggest improving classified sections or partnering with many news sites for a multi-site subscription.

The local newspapers have lost a lot of marketshare to online news sites and aggregators, but evolving to improve their popularity and traffic in the internet economy could help them to take back marketshare and increase revenue. SEO helps with promotion and expansion of audience. If you’re a local newspaper in need of increased business, seriously consider beefing up your search engine optimization game.

This past week at SMX East, I presented a longer-tail marketing tactic for Google Maps—creation and uploading of place marks data into the customizable “My Maps” section. For companies and individuals who have some rich local data to share, or local place expertise, My Maps may be for you!

If you’ve ever wished that you could engineer the Google Maps interface to highlight and display your local content, My Maps could be something of a dream-come-true. For content publishers, imagine if your content was pinpointed and presented throughout Google Maps, making it easy for people who are exploring local areas virtually to discover you? For small mom-and-pop businesses, imagine if consumers were able to find you via hundreds or thousands of listings in Google Maps instead of just one?

People frequently search for local places via maps—indeed, Hitwise counts four map sites in the top ten of its travel category. While inside the maps, there are a few ways by which searchers may be exposed to user-generated maps. First, in the left sidebar of Google Maps are displayed image thumbnail icons related to the query and below that are links to some of the top user-submitted maps:

Second, within the new Place Pages generated for each location, and on individual Place Pages for businesses, there are also links to various user-submitted links.

On these pages, the user-submitted maps which rank highest are typically those which are more popular and have the most views. Subject matter of things plotted in maps may be constrained by your content, but keywords in map names, map descriptions and appropriateness of map names to the area pinpointed by the maps Placemarks also affect how often searchers will see and click to view the custom maps.

Some of the custom maps have received significant numbers of click-throughs! I’ve seen some with over 60,000 views—an indication that these can sometimes be very worthwhile sources for referral traffic, if engineered well.

There are all sorts of useful custom maps that one could provide about local areas. Companies which develop value-add information maps about local areas could easily reap the benefit of having more content within Google Maps which can convert to more traffic to their websites. Some examples I’ve seen include a blog about coffee which pinpointed independent coffee shops of Denver, a map of local tourist destinations at Catalina Island, and maps for Silicon Valley cafes provided by Mapplr.

Those who create custom maps are provided with an unprecedented degree of control over content presented. As an example, I created a custom map for a non-profit group’s local area connection points, Operation Christmas Child’s New York drop-off locations. As you can see, I was able to customize the display of the information bubbles for each location by adding a description that included name, street address, phone number and a small pic from their website:

Within each, I also added a link back to Operation Christmas Child’s website.

This resulted in increased exposure for the charitable organization. Those dropoff locations now appear in Google Maps search results when one searches for “operation christmas child, new york,” and the link to the custom map now appears in those dropoff organizations’ Google Place pages.

The promotional value of such custom maps is clear for organizations and many businesses. By uploading useful locational info into Google Maps, you can increase your exposure and it can open up another long-tail channel for referral traffic.

Google’s My Maps can be generated in a few ways. One may click to create a map by hand. One may develop a KML file that pinpoints placemarks to be manually uploaded into Google’s My Maps. And, one can create a KML file and submit it for crawling via Sitemaps protocol (Here’s a link to the example KML file I created for the Operation Christmas Child NYC Map).

Tips for creating Google “My Maps:”

• Build out your Google Profile page. You can leverage brand name value with a well-chosen profile name. The Profile page ought to have a good custom avatar icon and should include links back to your website pages.
• Create maps that are useful.
• Link to the custom maps you build from your website.
• Customize the information bubble content for your placemarks.
• Include links in the info bubble content back to related pages on your site that provide additional information.
• Design custom placemark icons.
• If you’re providing more info about businesses already within Google Maps’ directory, use the same name for your placemarks as the business name to facilitate the My Map links to appear in the business’s Place page.
• Remember to include vitally-useful details such as addresses and phone numbers for placemarks where it makes sense to do so—leaving out those details harms usability.

Creating elegant and effective custom maps within Google Maps is easy to do and is one long-tail tactic that relatively few companies have exploited. If you use My Maps to promote a business or a site as I’ve described, be sure to leave comments below this article linking-to and describing the maps you’ve created!

Earlier, this spring, a number of local search marketers noticed that Google began displaying a 10-pack of local business listings based on searchers’ geolocation even when search queries didn’t include a local search term (such as a city name). Matt McGee suggested that this would likely alter user behavior and reduce referral traffic to online directories. Stats show it may have happened.

As you may recall, Google has increasingly mixed specialized, “vertical” search content into keyword search results for the past few years. Google refers to this as “Universal Search though other search engines have forms of this as well, referred to more generically as “blended search.”

Nowhere has blended search been quite so prominent as in the area of local searches. Sure, the little icons one can see for image and video results for some queries are attention-getting, but the local 10-pack of business directory listings coupled with a pinpoint map takes up more Google search results page real estate than any other piece of inserted vertical search content.

Previously, the 10-pack (and 3-pack and 1-box) business listing results primarily appeared when users included a qualifier to queries indicating that they were seeking local-specific information. Queries such as “dallas accountants” or “pizza in chicago” would invoke a local 10-pack, while broader queries without local qualifiers would not. But, that paradigm shifted late last year and more dramatically in Spring of 2009 (some experts such as Steve Espinosa suggest that the shift may’ve begun in late 2008, and I believe that’s the case—I believe Google tested this, perhaps on some limited number of broad keywords, and then expanded to a fuller set of commonly-sought local business-type keywords). Google has now been displaying a local 10-pack of results for these common local business keywords for a number of months.

The effect of this change appears to be a sharp reduction in the number of referrals from Google to internet yellow pages sites and other types of business directories. Compare in Google Trends—Google’s view of visitors to some top yellow page sites and business directories (Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, Citysearch.com, Whitepages.com):

Here are some more IYPs and business directories (DexKnows.com, YellowBook.com, Insiderpages.com, Local.com, Business.com):

I also checked trends for some foreign yellow pages such as ones in Canada, Australia and the U.K., and I’m seeing similar drops in referral visitors begining in spring as well.

Compare these trends with other directory and industry-specific verticals (Hotels.com, Cars.com, Monster.com, Expedia.com, Travelocity.com):

More industry-specific verticals (Lawyers.com, Martindale-Hubbell, Restaurants.com):

A number of notable local info sites appear to be bucking the trend or holding steady—most notably Yelp which is still holding steady, but also MerchantCircle, Zillow, ServiceMagic, and Realtor.com:

Also, Craigslist and BBB.org are also bucking the trend.

Now, I’m fully aware that there are literally thousands of variables involved which can affect daily unique visit metrics for these sites, and how Google Trends chooses to account visits can also affect these graphs. The only other recent data I’ve seen on this subject was some comScore graphs from a few days ago with an article on Techcrunch which noted that Yelp has doubled its audience in the last year while Citysearch has remained flat. In Google’s eyes according to the Google Trends graphs I provided above, Citysearch has actually lost visitors while Yelp is gaining.

Discrepancies in the graphs can be explained to some degree by different accounting methods and data sources—comScore is based on one sample set which would include usage going through Yahoo! and Bing, while Google is only seeing Google-centric traffic. I think Google Trends may be excluding some paid traffic as well, while comScore would be more of a catchall.

It’ll be interesting to see if the trends shown in Google’s graphs are reflected when the next comparative internet yellow pages ranking report emerges from comScore or Hitwise.

Still, it’s striking and likely significant to see that in Google’s eyes, quite a few of the major business directory sites have dropped in terms of organic referral visits. Since Google is leader in search marketshare, this represents a meaningful impact. This could definitely be impacted by the economy, yet, I’d expect the impact to have started earlier if the trends were merely due to economic issues. Adjusting for seasonal spiking from the late 2008 holiday season, it appears that the sites I mentioned lost significant amounts of referrals, and this happened during the timeframe when Google began displaying the 10-pack for a greater number of searches.

I interpret the main cause to be a change in users’ behavior. As more local listings were pushed directly to searchers from Google Maps in the 10-pack, fewer people found it necessary to click through to browse for businesses in local directory sites and internet yellow pages.

Now, this is not good news for the embattled yellow pages industry, who did not need to be losing marketshare to Google, particularly at this time. However, it’s vital that this trend be understood and aggressively fought, and it should be noted that Google has not completely closed the doors on directory sites. Not at all.

To turn this trend around, it’s necessary for sites which lost ground to step up their SEO efforts and to adapt to the changing conditions. Rapidly.

For now, Google’s still only displaying the local 10-pack for a limited, albeit substantial, number of business search terms. I see the 10-pack is not being automatically invoked in a great many cases where product names, alternative category names, and longer-tail keywords are being used in combo with local search terms. For instance, I just now searched for “asphalt roofing shingles, shreveport, la“, and there was no 10-pack invoked! There are a great many potential long-tail local business queries like this which can turn into valuable referrals for IYPs and business directories.

I see quite a lot of lost opportunities in SEO terms when I look over most business directory sites. Displaying the same, bare-bones content for a business’s listing which is also being displayed on hundreds of other sites is going to be less and less sufficient to maintaining organic referral traffic from search.

It may be necessary to expand out your taxonomy development efforts or partner with a company like ShopLocal, NearByNow or Where2GetIt to find out what is being sold at many of the stores listed in your directory. Finding ways to expand out keyword-rich description data about companies could be the deciding point in whether or not sites can continue to obtain natural, non-paid referral traffic.

Probably the biggest barrier for most online directories is in terms of slowness to evolve—either in recognizing the issues keeping them from obtaining and increasing search engine traffic or in streamlining IT development cycles in order to be sufficiently responsive to the changing landscape. I believe that some level of natural search traffic is vital on the internet for these directories for them to remain viable—both in terms of being able to monetize visitor traffic, as well as a vehicle for self-promotion in encouraging businesses to advertise. Yet, if a bureaucratic process is keeping you from being effective, it must be reengineered.

Two key aspects are likely playing into Yelp’s ability to continue to grow traffic, even while Google is pushing their own Maps listings to consumers for more local queries. One aspect is Yelp’s oft-cited ability to create and grow a strong community following as an effective blending of social media with business directory. Quite a few of these directories which have recently lost referral traffic according to Google Trends are also offering some user reviews and rating features in hopes of gaining Yelp’s level of success. Yet, they’ve failed to make such rating features easily usable, robust, and their user interfaces are cold and uncompelling in terms of giving a friendly “feel.” Are the tools flexible enough for users? Is the interface both intuitive and friendly? Do you allow users to customize their profile pages?

Another aspect helping Yelp during this period is that they’re essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings (though, Insiderpages listings also have the same treatment in Google SERPs, but perhaps their pages may not rank as well as Yelp’s for various other reasons). There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings and reviews should be adopting microformats, and it’s not that hard to do! For a more detailed explanation, read my recap on the subject, Why Use Microformats?

The unfortunate side effect of Google’s improving usability in local search results may be that this could result in some sort of industry-wide chilling effect. If IYPs and directory sites are feeling closed-out of Google search referral traffic, they may react by reviewing their engagement strategies and setting up restrictions on partnership deals with the search engine. Quite a number of these sites are already in some level of “coopetition” with Google, partnering on one hand by selling ads into the search engine’s network and delivering data into Google Maps while also attempting to continue to remain local info destination sites.

Local search marketing experts have long recommended that businesses improve their online presence by optimizing profiles in online yellow pages (IYPs) and local search engines. After accomplishing that, there still remains a lot of small, local “constellations” of geographically-oriented sites where companies should seek to maximize their presence as the next stage in their local SEO. Newspaper sites are pretty much at the top of the list following IYPs, so here are three ways that one can engage with them and optimize for search.

Local search engine optimization experts encourage businesses to update and improve their listings and profiles in the major internet sites because those sites are some of the top places where consumers look to find local information, and because the search engines also feed off of those sources as authoritative hubs for local biz data. This is why you’ll see experts like Andrew Shotland tracking and reporting on the top IYPs based on SEO factors, and why David Mihm’s important Local Search Ranking Factors survey shows how seriously we consider references from IYPs and which ones are the most important.

However, as Justin Sanger, founder of LocalLaunch, has pointed out in numerous local search marketing tactics sessions at major conferences, when we refer to local information sources online, “…local is extremely fragmented…”. When consumers seek locally-specific information, they’re now going to a plethora of sources online—review sites, local guides, yellow pages, local search, maps and also (despite many reports of their imminent deaths) newspapers.

If you’re looking to kick up your game in local search optimization another notch, you not only need to optimize in IYPs, but you need to optimize in many of the other sites where people are going to get their local information. And yes, that means newspapers!

I refer to the fragmented sources for local content as a “constellation” of sites, but I should perhaps use “local solar system,” because each geographic location can be visualized as a sort of star, having a number of sites and web pages revolving about it. In Google’s eyes, if your site is going to rank well for locally-specific searches for your area, there should ideally be a number of the sites in your local “solar system” which are mentioning you and linking to you as you are within the same gravitational pull as the rest of the group.

Most of the rhetoric you’ll find on the internet regarding newspapers and online news are discussing how traditional newspapers are failing at transitioning to online business models—for example, see John Keister’s Search Engine Land commentary “Can Newspapers Be Saved?” if you want a quickie recap. Yet, newspapers and their online versions are still used by a lot of people as a source for locally-specific content, and their pages frequently may be found indexed by Google and appear in news search and blog search results. Newspapers companies may founder, but that content is going to live on through search and the internet, long term, one way or another.

Search engines consider news and newspaper sites to be important and highly trustworthy, even if newspaper websites’ track records have been very poor in terms of crawlability and search optimization. Links & citations from newspaper sites and local news sites are valuable, and as newspapers syndicate their content to partners and step up their games in search marketing, those links will grow in marketing value for local businesses.

Technical savviness of newspaper sites varies considerably from city to city and region to region. Some are more worthwhile for you if you’re optimizing for your local business website. Some of the better ones have constructed their sites to be crawled and easily indexed by Google, while others are whining about the new business paradigm or actively trying to fight against the modern age.

Even if your town’s local newspaper site is highly non-optimal from an SEO standpoint, I’d still advise that you attempt to optimize with it to some degree as I’ve outlined below. Just because the newspaper site may be a crappy online channel today, doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow. Many sites are just one good developer away from having a database full of old news stories suddenly visible, ranking and spewing out RSS feeds through search engines tomorrow!

Among the types of sites which Google treats favorably include blogs, news, newspapers, and microblogging sites. There is a lot of research out there which shows that having links from such sites may continue to be very helpful in terms of your site’s rankings against competitors. Google’s recent testing of their next-generation search engine version, Caffeine, may also indicate that they perceive highly fresh news content and blogging content such as from microblogging site Twitter to be highly valuable. Google takes links from these types of sites and treats them as more trustworthy signals of a site’s relative popularity. One good link within a news story or blog post can be worth more than the sum of hundreds of low-quality links elsewhere.

And remember, links are not the only currency in ranking value for local search. As David Mihm outlines, citations may also be used as a major ranking factor. A citation can be when a business is referred to by name in text, without a link at all.

As such, Google may take either links or citations as an endorsement on the part of the author of a news story or blog post. Achieving either a citation or a link from a trusted site such as an online newspaper can help you to further pump up your local business’s rankings in both Google Maps results, and in the regular search results. Here’s how.

Three ways to optimize a business for local search via newspapers  

Get listed in the classifieds! Most newspapers were quick to create an online version of their classified ads when they opened their internet arm, and these are frequently very easy to appear in. Some even provide free listings, requiring you to pay extra for “premium” features. These may be worth the advertising fee if they’re cheap enough, friendly enough for search engine spiders and popular enough to be sought out by local consumers. Many newspapers may outsource the hosting of their classified functionality, and this can sometimes be indicated by the use of a different third-level domain. For instance, Alexandria, Louisiana’s newspaper, The Town Talk, has “classifieds.thetowntalk.com,” which appears to be operated by Gannett’s USAToday. When showing up in the classifieds, be aware that ads frequently expire within a short period of time, so do yourself a favor by setting the ad to automatically renew if the site allows. Don’t forget to add links, pics and video to classified ads if you’re able!

Expand your listing/profile in the newspaper’s yellow pages. It isn’t intuitive, but a lot of newspapers have their own, proprietary yellow pages directories on their websites, and all the same, great business profile optimization tactics apply here. Just as with classifieds, some newspaper sites outsource the development and hosting of their online yellow pages, such as the El Paso Times, which appears to be using Local.com’s yellow pages on the back end (see the listings for Plumbers, for example). In these cases, you may have to go directly to the parent yellow pages site, such as directly to Local.com, in order to optimize the business profile information.

Pitch stories and content about your business to local news reporters. Remember, your business may be one that reporters find interesting and newsworthy. This may be the most important tip of all, because it’s those highly-valuable links and citations that appear within the body of articles can often help your rankings the most. Here’s where traditional media relations and internet search optimization can converge. There are many ways that you can grab the attention of journalists and bloggers, and doing so can nab you some of your best links. Consider how your business might be interesting to a local reporter, and pitch your concept to them!

Come up with a media attention-grabbing stunt or hop on a media feeding frenzy by engineering some sort of response to current news items. Offer free quotes on contemporary “hot” news items as an expert commentator, and develop relationships with local reporters. One great source on how to do this is Jeff Crilley’s “Free Publicity” book which has really helped me ever since a friend gave me a copy. Get on a mailing list, such as through Peter Shankman’s HARO (Help A Reporter Out), and there are other sites where you can register to provide reporters with your expert “sourciness.”

Another tactic is to provide free content to journalists in return for a link, a tactic I outlined in a blog post, Why Free Photos = Good SEO. Using these tactics, I’ve personally gotten mentions and links from USAToday, InformationWeek, Pegasus News, the Temple Daily Telegram, and other news sites.

By using these three main avenues of increasing your presence in local news sites, you can further improve upon your local ranking “signal” with Google and other search engines. When selecting your news site, go for all the online equivalents of the local newspapers for your area, and don’t give up if you don’t see some sort of dramatic, overnight change. Consistency over the long term will give your work more opportunity to have an effect, and can help build your stature as a site and company that merits good ranking treatment for local searches.

Geotagging, the practice of associating precise geocoordinates with web pages or other content, has been around for a while and has seen some popularity increase as photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Panoramio have adopted the practice. Is it worthwhile for your locally-oriented site as well?

Geotagging allows webmasters to embed geographic coordinates within pages, images and other media, and semantic markup informs devices and search engine bots of the longitude and latitude information. Such coordinates can be very useful in pinpointing the locations associated with the information on maps, such as  Flickr’s map interfaces.

In the past, I’ve strongly recommended the use of semantic markup in the form of hCard microformats as a component of local search optimization. hCard allows contact info such as addresses and phone numbers to be disclosed precisely to devices that are able to read them. Not only have Yahoo! and Google both coded their own local results pages with such microformats, they’ve also been increasingly paying attention to the content and treating it specially in certain cases when they encounter it on other websites as the crawl pages for indexing and displaying their search results.

Frazier Miller, General Manager for Yahoo! Local, described the basis for this interest in his keynote address at SMX Local-Mobile conference last year, defining the “local web” as any online content that is geotagged or that is tied to the “real world.”

As for what the search engines are doing with this locational semantic markup when they find it on websites, so far Yahoo! enabled webmasters to build special search applications with their SearchMonkey development platform in 2008, and in 2009 Google has enabled pages that contain hReview and RDFa semantic markup to have special displays (aka “rich snippets”) in search results listings.

Most of my focus in this area has been upon optimization tactics for local businesses. Indeed, I think with the advent of Google’s Rich Snippets, the advice to incorporate microformats was sound. Geotags can be a subset of hCard microformatting, so I’ve already been advising webmasters to include geotag their pages for some time now.

Yet, there’s a small family of tags intended for merely conveying geocoordinates with webpages and other content, i.e. “geotags,” and these do not have to be for local things which have street addresses. hCard is a webpage form of vCard, intended to allow people to simply pass and store street address and contact info like phone numbers or email addresses.

For content that is not particularly street address or contact-info oriented, geotags could make sense.

For instance, photos of various places could be tied to locations where they were snapped. All sorts of locational information can be pinpointed using geotags, where hCards would make less sense: ATMs, scenic overlooks, parks, rest stops, historical markers, places where significant events occurred, camp sites, places where photos were snapped or videos shot, and more.

There’s no dominant standard for geotag formatting, so one may add a combination of them to a webpage so that devices looking for specific types would be more likely to find ones they can read. Coordinates can also be embedded within images’ EXIF meta data as well as in other types of media, but I’m focusing here only on tags which can go into HTML pages.

Some of the tags are purely semantic markup, and are not visibly displayed on web pages, while others are shown.

Here are examples of the top geotag formats:

Geo microformat (coordinates display visibly)

<span class=’geo’>

<span class=’latitude’>40.693889</span>;

<span class=’longitude’>-74.043611</span>

</span>

RDF (defined by W3C, coordinates display visibly)

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# xmlns:geo=”http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#”> <geo:Point>

<geo:lat>40.693889</geo:lat>

<geo:long>-74.043611</geo:long>

</geo:Point> </rdf:RDF>

Geo tag meta data format (coordinates invisible on webpage)

<meta name=”geo.position” content=”40.693889;-74.043611″>

<meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Liberty Island, New York, United States”>

<meta name=”geo.region” content=”us-ny”>

ICBM meta tag (defined by The Internet Engineering Task Force’s Geographic Registration of HTML working document, coordinates invisible on webpage)

<meta name=”ICBM” content=”40.693889,-74.043611″>

If you were only going to add one set of geotags, I’d suggest adding either the Geo microformat or RDF, because they’re supported in some ways by Yahoo! and Google (”supported” in the sense that both deliver up local content with microformats, and both have used microformats and RDF for purposes of special results listing treatments). Also, providing the coordinates on the page visibly can enhance usefulness as people are able to copy them directly into their GPS devices.

But, I believe it’s possible to combine the tags and use all of them at once.

Will this give your pages some sort of ranking advantage?  Not really. 

However, the trends are moving in this direction, and geotagging your content could get your pages adopted by more sites specializing in using the data in innovative ways, and help you to achieve more inbound links.

This spring, Idearc Media LLC filed for Chapter 11, planning to reorganize to get out from under massive debt, and in the process, leave thousands of stockholders holding worthless paper. Idearc’s failure could easily be thought of as yet another in a long list of companies experiencing woes due to the economy, but is this the actual cause? I think someone should be asking if Verizon itself was responsible for spinning off the company with an unreasonable debt load in the first place.

Disclosure: I was a former employee and stockholder until the company announced its intention of reorganizing. Even though I’ve been widely known for predicting the “yellow pages would be toast” , my analysis indicated to that there should be a number of good years of business and revenue in print directories before anything was likely to turn critical. And, there should have been time for yellow pages companies to transition over from dependence on print revenue to create sufficient income from IYP. So, I was bit surprised by this sequence of events along with many others. Some background:

Idearc Media is one of the largest yellow pages directory companies, publishing YP directories on behalf of Verizon throughout the U.S., and operating one of the most popular online yellow pages sites, Superpages.com. Verizon spun off Idearc as a stand-alone company in late 2006.

When Idearc made the Chapter 11 announcement , it almost immediately was met with criticism from major stockholders. After all, the company had really large amounts of cash-flow, and if truly extensive measures were taken, many wondered why the business couldn’t manage itself back out of the red and into better profitability. But, the huge debt load carried by the company has sandbagged it to such a degree that it was struggling to make Wall Street happy even before the economy went sour.

In fact, that heavy debt load was so great that when the company launched, executives immediately began applying ambitious and even perhaps aggressive focus upon pushing sales. One Idearc class action lawsuit claim which has been filed subsequent to the Chapter 11 filing, claims that executives knowingly pumped up the numbers of scheduled sales and billings by reducing debt worthiness requirements, allowing previously weak or unworthy businesses to obtain advertising on account and to be billed later — a flavor of practice which tastes much like what has caused the failures in the mortgage industry.

However, even this claimed aggressive increase in extending credit to potentially unworthy businesses likely wouldn’t have occurred if the company itself wasn’t already experiencing intensive pressures due to its heavy debt load.

This debt load came when Verizon first spun-off Idearc. The $9 billion debt load has not necessarily been due to mismanagement of Idearc’s assets and ongoing business. Verizon had decided to push away what had been one of its most profitable assets (based on profit ratio per cost — not in overall income for the Verizon umbrella company). Verizon leaders said something along the lines of “…this is no longer our core competency…”, and they pushed the division away to stand on its own. When they did that, they also required payment back for the worth of the company in order to satisfy their stockholders.

My big questions in this are: was the valuation of Idearc realistic? Was Idearc spun off with an unrealistic debt load that it would be unlikely to ever be able to service?

The fact that Verizon in the years just previous to the spinoff had undertaken one of the most massive investments in networking history in order to build a fiber optics network — aka “Verizon FiOS” — “to the premises” — all the way to people’s homes, in other words. The cost of this undertaking was incredibly massive, and some opined that it would take Verizon many more years to actually realize profits from the capital investment, if it ever would.

Verizon’s spinoff of Idearc likely came from a desire to sell off a big asset that was not considered “core” to the company, in large part so that they could pay off some of the debts created by the Verizon FiOS expansion. Approximately 22% of Verizon’s FiOS investment debt was removed by this exercise, according to some analysts.  In statements, Verizon CFO Doreen Toben even seemed to directly link the sale of Idearc with a desire to reduce the company’s debt.

As part of the deal when Idearc was spun off, Verizon required that the company pay back its worth over the course of a number of years. My understanding of these debt payments was that the payment amounts would actually increase over time so that they were steadily growing — perhaps like balloon payment.

Was the size of this debt a realistic valuation of Idearc? This seems highly doubtful to me. The largest chunk of the yellow pages division’s yearly revenue was dependent upon print directories, and it was clear prior to the spinoff that print yellow pages was likely to be moving into a major decline, much like newspapers. Prior to the spinoff, analysts such as myself predicted decline in the YP print side of the house and Wall Street analysts were fast coming to see a likely trend for advertiser dollars to be moving away from print media towards online. Shouldn’t Verizon have known this, and factored that into the valuation and the debt requirements?

Obviously, Verizon felt that this part of the company was of less worth to them, rather than being a major strategic asset. Undoubtedly they perceived a weakening in this asset, coupled with a potential of being able to cash it out and use the money to help fund the FiOS project.

After the spinoff of Idearc, Verizon turned around and resold the debt instruments to other companies. The loan agreements which required Idearc to make simply whopping payments over time, were now bought by other companies and Verizon was no longer attached. Now, this may be or may have been “Business As Usual” for a splitting-off of one company from another, but the sequence rather smacks of something similar to Enron or other unsavory deals where one knowingly sells off debt-laden assets at a hyper-inflated rate, only to leave the new owner holding the bag on a worthless item. It’s these creditors which were passed the hot potato of Idearc, and they’re now very interested in moving Idearc along to be “reorganized”.

“Reorganization” sounds very positive, and sounds very responsible, but it’s essentially a euphemism for taking the company away from the stockholders in return for forgiveness of debts which Idearc could never pay. Stockholders will be left holding worthless paper in place of their investments, most likely. The debt holders end up holding the company, paid for at the expense of the investors.

The sequence smacks of a shell game, and many small stockholders are left with nothing at the end of it, and rather confused by what happened.

The whole question all goes back to the debt load, though. It’s so unreasonably high, the company just can’t function.

Yes, print media is in decline. But, it still has loads of revenue in it, even if it may be falling off by some percentage points each year.

Yes, the economic pressures also had an effect on the company bottom line, but it wasn’t the prime cause of failure. The economy at most pushed Idearc into critical mode at a faster rate than otherwise, and Idearc likely still would be facing this situation even if the economy were healthy.

Yes, extending credit to less-worthy businesses could also cause financial problems, but not to such a degree as to cause failure. Uncollected accounts are a common problem throughout the YP industry, and I doubt they were of sufficient percentage to have been the base cause of failure. The biggest financial void sucking away at Idearc’s bottom line are the debt payments — I think that even if credit hadn’t been extended as the class action suit claims, there still would’ve been a financial failure because the initial debt load was just too high.

So that leaves us with the question, who should be held responsible, if anyone should?

I’m asking these questions and putting forward this theory on the cause and responsibility of the company’s failure because a great many innocent stockholders are being hurt. From my perspective, the company executives are more focused on trying to get out from under the debt the quickest means possible, rather than focusing on their fiduciary duties — for them, it’s an exercise in changing ownership. If only the company offered their SuperGuarantee to their own stockholders! Meanwhile, I think some of the class-action lawsuits are perhaps barking up the wrong trees.

It’s my opinion that Verizon should likely be held responsible in large part for Idearc’s debt load, and they should perhaps be required to assume some of it back. I think the case could be made that the executives involved may have knowingly spun off Idearc with higher-than-reasonable debt loads, and then they turned around and offloaded that debt at a discount in return for cash.

The SEC should really investigate this. These questions should be answered prior to Chapter 11 going forward. If Idearc executives truly “explored all options” before proceeding with the filing, I doubt they explored the possibility that Verizon should maybe be held accountable for spinning off an unreasonble debt and then unloading the loans, leaving stockholders to suck it up.

For those of us who work in local search optimization, it’s clear that Google PageRank is less and less important as a factor in result rankings. It’s not difficult to find instances where businesses with lower PageRank are listed higher than competitors in the local 10-pack, and some  like Matt McGee point out cases where companies with no website at all are ranking well. These cases show that in Google’s local searches, PageRank has been pushed aside in favor of a ranking process that’s often independent of websites: I’ll call it “BizRank”.

Now, the fact that Google Maps contains listings with no associated websites is nothing new. When they first launched their service that mashed up keyword search + yellow pages directory + map interface, it contained many listings with no sites.

Yet, for many of us in search marketing, our focus and even some level of unspoken agreement has been that listings with website URLs have a clear advantage over bare-bones listings that only sport address and phone numbers. But, what has changed is that the ranking factors seem to have shifted by some degree to give a bit less preference to websites and the relative rankings of websites. PageRank seems to have become a far weaker factor in the ordering of businesses in Google 10-packs and Google Maps.

In this year’s installment of David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey, participants rated inbound links as lower importance in influencing rankings compared with the previous year. And when rating the impact of “PageRank of Homepage/Highest-Ranked Page,” participants gave that only a 1.52, or “very low importance” (Disclosure: I personally rated it higher than that, but I cravenly claim that this was because “PageRank” is sometimes used to denote the entire combo of 200+ ranking factors Google now uses, and I was a bit tired out when I worked through the survey).

Most of us would probably still agree that merely having a website appears to give a business more potential opportunities for ranking higher in the local SERPs. Consumers like access to extra info, straight from the business itself, and websites give businesses the chance to control their own messaging and to persuade consumers to convert.

It’s easy to find instances of web-less businesses outranking listings that do have sites in Google 10-packs or Google Maps. For example:

The second listing has no business website associated with it, but it outranks other local listings in the same keyword category.

The implicit message that examples like this convey is that some other ranking factors must be weighted much more heavily than PageRank. Since there are also many instances of lower PR sites outranking higher PR sites, the combination of other factors involved must be more influential than PageRank alone.

Here’s a brief list of some of the other top factors that I believe may be getting more weight:

Keyword relevance. There appears to be a high correlation between keyword content in listing/profile/site content and the user’s search query.

Location proximity. The business location needs to be near/within the area being searched upon. While some of us believe that this isn’t being given quite the level of importance it once was, it’s common sense that the business needs to be near the area or it won’t work for the consumer. Previously, Google appeared to make the companies closest to the search centroid have higher rank, but now that’s shifted as the businesses seem to only be within the area being searched and actual rankings are based more heavily on other factors. Mike Blumenthal stated in the Local Search Ranking Factors survey that “Having a high Location Prominence Score is a 5 in terms of importance…”. He’s probably referring to Google’s local search patent, “Scoring local search results based on location prominence”, described by Bill Slawski. Listings need to be geographically relevant to have a chance to appear in the results.

Business viability confirmation. One of the biggest problems in local SERPs is trying to weed out no-longer-valid business listings. When companies close up shop, they often do not turn off websites or notify directories to delete their business listings. Further, even once deleted, listings frequently “return from the dead” as your data suppliers reintroduce the same defunct listings from their sources. These “zombie listings” create a very poor user experience when consumers try to call phone numbers or visit stores which are no longer in operation. So, I believe that Google has added weight to factors which provide evidence that the business is actually still in operation. Some of these factors include:

• Recent update by biz owner in Google Local Biz Center
• Recent change in data from trusted directory partner
• Recent refresh from InfoUSA (they verify each & every listing at least once per year!)
• Recent review by Google Maps user
• Recent mentions in blogs or news sources (”citations” or “references”)
• Recent change/update on the business’s website or their blog
• Business associated with listing is advertising in AdWords

References. As Google seeks to move away from cold and sometimes arbitrary criteria for ranking businesses, they are looking for signals which could indicate relative quality and popularity. Hence the increasing interest from some of us for a somewhat vague signal called “citations” or “references”. On the face of it, one would figure that user reviews and ratings would provide this, but those signals are awfully prone to manipulation by the business or by competitors. Instead, things such as mentions about the business in blog postings, news stories, and email notes may provide a bit more concrete source for relative ranking. In this context, a “reference” could be when the URL, business name, street address or phone number are mentioned. All indicate that the business or location has some significance.

Have I oversimplified what’s involved in effective local SEO by conjecturing BizRank and its associated factors? Probably.

But, there’s no question that PageRank is of less weight in the Google Local search result rankings, compared with simple keyword search. Listings with no websites can outrank businesses that do have sites. So, some combination of signals are at play which are now stronger than some of the classic SEO components. It may not be called “BizRank” within the Googleplex, but something like what I’ve described is at work.

More importantly, this has the potential to spill over into the regular keyword search results and impact rankings there as well. If a local website is ranked higher than its competitors in Google Maps, it perhaps should also rank higher in the regular SERPs as well, for the same reasons.

As Google now has expanded the influence of users’ locations by showing more local results for non-local-specific queries , we could be on the cusp of a significant paradigm shift if they decide that the Google Maps algorithm should begin influencing rankings within the regular keyword search results.

Many businesses seek to target local searchers for their products and services, and careful review of a site’s analytics is one of the key weapons in a local business’s competitive arsenal. Here are a few tips on what metrics to look at and how to use some of them in optimizing your site to rank better in local search results.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the SMX Search Analytics conference, and one of the topics I spoke upon was how to use Google Analytics in optimizing local sites. Some of the examples in this article come from that presentation, and I’m adding a few other details to the mix.

First, to set the stage, many businesses have a moderately good idea as to the sort of keyword phrases for which they would like to rank. A “family law” attorney in Miami, might believe they should appear high in the results for all “family law” queries, but if they ranked at the top of all searches for that phrase tons of people elsewhere in the country would see their listing, which would not be all that relevant to those people’s needs, and the attorney’s site would get a lot more traffic and needless phone calls than they should have to deal with. Searchers trying to zero in upon businesses local to their area might add a geographic qualifier to the end of the term, and search for something like “family law miami.”

In actuality, a business ought to first do some keyword research to figure out what keywords and phrases consumers are most likely to use when seeking their type of company. In this attorney’s case, they might quickly find that while “family law” is a formal term more preferred by their profession, more of their potential customers are likely searching for the term “divorce”. And, in most cases, consumers are searching for “lawyers” when trying to find listings of this type of business, rather than “attorneys”.

So, if thorough research were done, we’d find that the more advantageous terms to target for their area would be both “divorce lawyer” and “divorce attorney”, coupled with the “miami” geographic qualifier.

Even more subtly, should the phrase have the city name before or after the business type keyword? “divorce lawyer miami” or “miami divorce lawyer”? Again, diligent keyword research would tell us (both phrases, “divorce lawyer miami” and “miami divorce lawyer” are most frequently occurring). In most cases, the slightly higher-frequency phrase will have the geographic qualifier first.

Once you have identified your ideal keyword targeting phrases and have properly optimized your site for those terms, then you need to do a bit of review with your analytics results to double check how things are actually functioning.

Your assumption is that now you’ve targeted your local search keyword phrase, you should be getting mostly searchers from your local area coming to your site (some types of businesses are excepted, such as travel-oriented companies where many people from outside the area could be seeking it out, such as for hotels, rental cars, cruises, etc.).

Top analytics packages provide reports on the geographic locations of your site visitors via geolocation technology, so you’d first want to look at those reports to see if you’re getting traffic from visitors in your local area. For example, if you were a Texas-based business, you’d expect to get a lot of traffic from visitors within that state. Here’s the sort of reports you might see within your analytics package (this example from Google Analytics):

There are some instances when you may get substantial traffic from really distant locations when perhaps you should not. For instance, if your business name contains the name of some other geographic area, it could be coming up as matching user queries for that area. For example, the “Denver Southwest LP” company has offices physically located in Houston, Texas. And “Houston’s Restaurant” has a physical location in Dallas, Texas. The “Adele Dallas Orr Fashion Boutique” is located in Chicago, Il. There are simply tons of instances where businesses are sharing names with distant cities.

There are also cases where a business’s city name is shared elsewhere as well. “Houston, Mississippi,” “Dallas, Florida,” and “Denver, Pennsylvania” are just a few cases in point.

You may not even realize that your site could be getting a substantial bit of unqualified traffic from people way outside of your area! Analytics can tell you if you’re getting an unusual amount of traffic from places outside the area where you offer service, and even tell you which landing pages are receiving the most traffic from these people.

If you’re not getting traffic from the people in your local area, and/or if you’re getting suspicious amounts of traffic from another city because you share a name with it or the city name is shared by another city elsewhere, then this indicates you may need to adjust something.

If you were a pizza restaurant in “Houston, Mississippi”, you might feel a bit of despair when you quickly realize you might never expect to rank for searches for “pizza in houston.” However, internet users rapidly clue into how the search engines function, and they respond by self-adjusting their queries to get what they’re seeking. Natives of Houston, Mississippi likely very quickly learn to append the state abbreviation to their queries, such as “houston ms pizza”.

So, if you found yourself getting a lot of unqualified traffic from people very distant from you, you might review to see if the SEO design of the frequent landing pages of those visitors was sound, and you might find you need to make phrases in the titles and header tags, and perhaps other page signals a bit more specific by adding additional qualifiers. You might also need to dig around and check to see if any major online directories have incorrectly indexed your business in the wrong city, or accidentally applied your website URL to a listing of a business with a similar-sounding name in another city. Such data can get fed into the search engines, and it’s not unheard of for Google to apply URLs to the wrong business.

If you are unlucky enough to have a business name which is generating unqualified traffic due to these sorts of issues, it does not mean you need to totally freak out about it. You should expect you’ll probably continue to receive unqualified traffic from the related locality well into the future. Being overly aggressive about trying to eradicate all unqualified referrals could harm your overall SEO health, so don’t go overboard. Reviewing your analytics, though, may help you to realize if and when this is happening, and help you to tweak things to reduce the incidence. This is mainly additive, in the sense that it may lead you to add more qualifying terminology into your pages such as names of neighborhoods, zip codes or regions.

(In an effort to further refine the local search experience, Google has recently begun to geotarget users for some non-locally-specified queries with some local business results, reducing user dependency upon adding geographic modifiers to keyword phrases, and reducing the incidences of local businesses getting unqualified traffic. My expectation is that if the functionality is not later revoked, this will actually change searchers’ behavior over time so that users will become lazier about adding in geographic modifiers as they find they do not need to in order to get back the information that’s precisely what they’re seeking.)

Another area to look at closely in analytics will be your keyword reports. These are derived by your analytics system from the “referral URLs” of popular search engines. Your analytics system parses out searchers’ keywords from the query strings in referral URLs of major search engines which send traffic to your site, and then they compile the numbers of referrals brought to you for each keyword and keyword phrase over time.

Once again, you’d expect that a lot of the keyword phrases which bring traffic to your local biz site would include those local qualifier terms—primarily your city name in most cases. Here’s an example from a friend’s site about Texas history (he lets me experiment with his site in return for some optimization advice):

Keyword reports may help establish whether the terms we’ve set up following initial keyword research are more popular or not in actual practice. If you’ve experimented over time with targeting both “miami attorneys” and “miami lawyers” (and achieved equivalent rankings with both), yet you find that the “attorneys” term actually brings in much more traffic, you may want to adjust your strategy to exploit what works best. Keyword research is a starting point, while keyword research coupled with analytic results is an ongoing refinement process.

The keyword reports not only help to establish if you’re receiving traffic from the phrases you’re targeting, but they’re highly valuable for researching to see how users arrive at your site, and also for discovering additional phrases that you might not already be specifically targeting. If you dig down into such reports and find some phrases or references to types of content which you had not targeted, consider building pages and content specifically to be relevant to those terms and you could key into even more qualified traffic.

I recommend that you look at your keyword reports and search on popular phrases yourself. In this way, you can see things exactly the way that your site visitors will experience them, and you may discover areas where you can improve and optimize further. What if a user is arriving on your site on a page that’s delivering an error message, or what if it’s not the most-ideal content for the query? It serves little purpose if you initially bring in a visitor only to have them immediately bail out when they feel you’re not delivering what they’re seeking.

Just to underscore this point, Avenish Kaushik, Evangelist for Google Analytics, recently blogged about how Bounce Rate can be effectively used to improve site performance.

I don’t know how many times I’ve delved into a client’s analytics, only to discover that users are arriving on the site and are then unable to locate the info they’re specifically seeking. For example, on my friend’s Texas history site, one of the top referral keyword phrases has been “alamo historical marker:”

Yet, when I clicked through, I found that Google had decided that the page for the “City of Alamo, Texas” was most-relevant on the site for this term, rather than the pages dedicated to the famous Alamo building in San Antonio. There are a number of ways of addressing this issue, but we decided to deal with it by providing a little helpful navigation aid on the upper right corner of the page to assist such visitors with rapidly locating precisely what they wanted:

Once this was added, the page views per visit for those arriving via the query “alamo historical marker” was improved considerably:

Noticing things such as this and making ongoing quality improvements can really help to improve traffic, conversions, and, yes, even rankings over time.

Since most top analytics systems can inform you how many referrals come from each search engine, it somewhat reduces the demand for those engines to inform businesses how much traffic they pass via the organic keyword search and local search listings. However, external analytics cannot tell you what the percentage of total searches is for your desired keywords for which you’re receiving clickthroughs (i.e. “clickthrough rate”). You’d need to know the total number of searches going on by each phrase in addition to how many referral visits you’re getting to achieve this, and you only know the total referrals portion of it. In the case of Google, it also doesn’t allow you to know how many of the referrals are coming as a result of your listing appearing in the local one-box versus in the regular keyword results listings.

Google’s local business center has begun displaying how many impressions versus “views” your listings are receiving (I have slight heartburn over this terminology—I think they should use “impressions” and “clickthroughs”.) But, unless you capture this number on the first day of each month, subtract out referral visits from the “maps.google.com” subdomain, and then compare against your overall visits referred by Google search results, you still cannot deduce your general CTR on your Google local one-box versus the regular keyword search results.

To my knowledge, none of those software packages which monitor search result rankings are really able to differentiate between the local one-box versus regular search results listings on pages, either, making it very difficult for people to track their rankings in the one-box results over time unless they do so manually. This is disappointing, because it would probably be very easy for Google to provide these metrics.

Martijn Beijk wrote some really great instructions (published on Mike Blumenthals’ blog: Tracking Local Search Traffic With Analytics) on how to set up tracking URLs to use for your listings in the Google Local Business Center, using some customization in Google Analytics to help differentiate the clicks between the 1-box/3-pack/10-packs and regular search results.

Local businesses also receive phone calls from their local listings, and there are some businesses which make use of various call-tracking methods to attempt to gauge which of their promotional channels are more effective at sending them customers.

Purely from the standpoint of search engine optimization, I’m not a terribly big fan of using tracking URLs or special tracking phone numbers. I believe that there is a risk that such tactics can negatively impact potential success of optimization work. One “happy medium” solution is to set up tracking URLs and phone numbers for a briefly limited period of time, such as one to two months, and then go back to using the primary URLs and phone numbers for the long term. While this might disappoint data-junkies, it would get some actionable data while staying out of the way of long-term optimization potential.

These are just a small handful of ways in which your web analytics may help you in understanding your visitor traffic and in optimizing your site for local search. I encourage businesses to get comfortable with their analytics packages rather than merely implement them and ignore them, and to start intelligently exploring what the data means, and how it can be used to help improve their site performance.

A couple of years ago when local search engine optimization started becoming a hot topic, I winced when I heard other search marketers recommending that local businesses include their street address in all page titles. Not only did this seem like overkill to me, but the school of “everything-and-the-kitchen-sink” in title tags can result in relevancy dilution for a site trying to rank highest for its most important keyword phrases.

But, here’s the exception case for when street addresses included in a page’s title tag can be very advantageous for a business.

As I’ve written previously, most local businesses should include their business name, category, and city name in their page titles, particularly on their homepage.

Some businesses are fortunate enough to be located at a particularly famous street address. From a business marketing perspective, such addresses are significant because they provide possibility of an advantage that these businesses can further exploit. In the offline world, a business that’s located at a popular or famous location already has a built-in advantage in terms of automatically having street traffic or foot traffic—some percentage of which is likely to convert. If you observe the built-in advantage these businesses enjoy, you’d quickly become a proponent of the old local marketing credo, “Location, location, location!”

These business also enjoy the online equivalent of the popular location, since a relatively larger number of people are likely to type the address into search engines and local search engines in order to get maps and other information about the location.

Google Maps has noticed this propensity and has helpfully provided reverse search results for addresses.

Imagine if your business was located in the shopping center where Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is located in Los Angeles, or if your business was one of those which shares space in the Empire State Building in New York City. Here’s what Google Maps shows when one searches for either of those famous addresses:

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre Google Maps Address Search  6801 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

Empire State Building Google Maps Address Search  350 5th Ave, New York, NY

Google is helpfully listing around twenty of the businesses located at that address alongside the map. To appear beside the map, Google likely bases this upon the business address that they have in their Google Local database (if your business isn’t already listed there, you could register in the Google Local Business Center). However, users are committing street address searches in the regular keyword search side as well—and pages which have that street address reflected in the title are more likely to appear in the street address search results.

Your business doesn’t have to be located in quite as such a high-visibility location as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or the Empire State Building in order for there to be sufficient cause to optimize for street address searches. For instance, there are a lot of businesses around the country that are located at large shopping centers, local landmarks, and tourist hotspots.

For instance, Peabody Place in Memphis, Tennessee, is both a tourist hotspot due to being attached to the famous Peabody Hotel, and it’s also a shopping center. Conceivably, there could be quite a number of people who would type its street address into search engines, and businesses associated with that address will appear in the reverse search results:

Peabody Place Google Maps Address Search  150 Peabody Pl, Memphis, TN

Once again, this optimization tactic should really be reserved more for those businesses that are located at addresses which are somehow significant and therefore likelier to be independently searched upon. If it’s likely that users will search by the street address, then there’s maybe going to be enough traffic to justify having that address info in one of the business’s title tags. Having the business appear as a sort of “reverse search result” when users search by address gives opportunity that more consumers will notice the business and become customers.

But, far more businesses in the country are located at insignificant addresses. If your business is the only thing located at your street address, it’s a safe bet that too few people will be searching for your street address by itself to justify watering down your title to include it. Far greater advantage is to be had for these businesses if they come up higher in the rankings for their “bizname + city” and “category + city”. If the street address was included in the title in this case, it would dilute the relevancy on the more advantageous keyword phrases.

Just as with many tactics in search marketing, one size does not fit all. For those businesses which have a popular street address, this tactic can include a real bump up in online prominence which could also translate into more real world customers.

If your company has a major brand, domainers who exploit cybersquatting have likely already targeted your business. Their practices are often looked down upon, but if their dark powers weren’t effective, they wouldn’t make money. Still, you can learn the same black magic and turn it into good and profit for your company. In this down economy, don’t ignore the shady domainers—instead, strike back by reducing what they’re costing you and increasing your profits! Read on and I’ll explain how.

I don’t want to stray too far off into a tangent, but terminology has been rapidly shifting about, so I’ll touch on that briefly. “Domaining” is the practice of buying domain names, with the intent of later selling them at a profit. “Domaineering” is a relatively new term the industry is employing to refer to obtaining domain names to use as an advertising medium.

Frequently, domaineers seek to buy valuable keyword domains that people might reasonably go to directly as “type-in traffic” and then park ad content on them, making PPC revenue off the clicks of users who come to the site.

Cybersquatters are unethical domainers or domaineers who obtain trademarked and service-marked terms as domain names in order to make money off of the intellectual property of others. In most cases these days, cybersquatters cannot compel companies to buy back their own marks as domains, since those companies can often force the cybersquatter to relinquish the domain without profit. So, cybersquatters are more frequently taking the domaineering route, buying up domains, and keeping a low profile while profiting off of the clickthroughs of the ads targeted to the victimized brand names. (Such variant brand name domains can also be sold for profit on the gray market.)

So, how do they get away with it—why aren’t they noticed?

Unethical domaineers are highly adept at generating variations upon brand name domains. They register common misspellings of brand name domains, frequently occurring typos, lookalike domains and related stems (registering a plural for a singular term, for instance).

When I used to work for Verizon (now Idearc) Superpages.com, I occasionally assisted the intellectual property department in policing and referring infringing domains over to them for handling. Although back when the new company name was launched Verizon proactively registered a great many of these variant names and used MarkMonitor to help watch for more, there were always new product names being introduced that allowed openings for cybersquatters and character combinations that their monitoring missed. (Not to mention, the IP department seemed more hyper-focused on “Verizon” name derivatives, and less on satellite brands like “Superpages.com”.)

Over time, I’ve run across a great many cases of cybersquatting—not just with Verizon, but also with a really large number of major name-brand sites.

It took me only a few minutes to find some examples like these:

• www.cokacola.com
• www.veriz0n.com
• www.verizpn.com
• www.g00g1e.com
• www.1bm.com
• www.micr0s0ft.com
• www.go0gle.com
• www.g0ogle.com
• www.googlw.com
• www.microosft.com

While you can imagine that these major name brands like Coca-Cola, Verizon, Google, IBM and Microsoft are all big targets for this sort of thing due to their high popularity, lesser brands are also targets for this and are frequently far less well policed. (As of the time of writing this article, none of these domains are pointing to the official sites of the brand names the domains are based upon.)

Many of these types of domains are essentially stealing brand traffic—they are brand parasites. Even worse, a number of the major brand companies involved are actually paying the parasites to do this! You can often find PPC ads from the victimized companies appearing on the typosquatting sites, and money also passes to innocent affiliates and distributors whose ads also appear on these sites. Innocent or no, the money often should be going to you directly rather than going through them due to a bogus domain.

Stop paying parasitic middlemen, and take back your brand! Force the bad guys to relinquish infringing domains, and get them pointed directly at your site!

Using their same methodologies, seriously consider registering other variant names and 301 redirect all of them to your main site.

While an individual misspelling may bring you relatively small amounts of traffic, this sort of long-tail-brand-traffic can definitely add up over time. A single brand name can have quite a lot of potential misspelling and typo variations as well—in bulk, the traffic from all of these could actually give your site a small bump up.

Also, if you proactively block the unethical domainers from nabbing your brand-variation domains, you’ll save money you’d pay to them in advertising fees and money you’d pay to affiliates, and your legal department would be saved considerable time and money in the long run.

Just as a best practice, misspellings of your brand/domain names should be registered by you and 301 redirected to your main domain.

Here’s a list of types of domain name variations that squatters exploit:

• Word stems – plural and singular forms of words, other versions associated with the word (example: ”macy.com“ );
• Misspellings – (common/uncommon misspellings, phonetic spellings)
• Typos
• Versions of words with various letters dropped off
• Versions of words with extra letters inserted (such as adding extra “www” at beginning of names) Ex: wwwgoogle.com
• Transposed letters
• Lookalikes: domains with various letters exchanged for other characters which closely resemble them
• Other permutations – multiple-word domains with dashes or underscores separating the words
• Homophones or phonetic spellings (example: EyePhone.com)
• Domains with another Top Level Domain (”TLD”) suffix, such as .NET, .BIZ, .INFO, .FR, .BE, .IT, .DE, etc.
• Domains of your name translated into the equivalent word(s) in another language?

Since there can be various combinations of all of the above, there are many combinations possible for a company’s brand names! And, don’t just limit it to the company name alone. All a company’s marks should be checked for this sort of thing.

Nearly everyone who owns a domain name has got a domainer cleverly receiving traffic when people mistype the “.COM” part of their domain names—if you leave out the “O”, you end up getting redirected to an affiliate site, an ad, or to a parked domain page. Ex:

• www.microsoft.cm

This is because the famous domainer, Kevin Ham , made a deal with the country of Cameroon to allow him to wildcard any unregistered domain name traffic for the .CM TLD.

And, there have long been rumors he might eventually persuade the Colombian governing body to allow a similar arrangement with the “.CO” TLD!

There are tools out there which can help you to automatically generate lists of variation words to use as domain names, if you want to police your brand.

One of the best tools for this used to be a Microsoft research project, Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol—it was once my favorite tool. Unfortunately, this project is no longer being supported and upgraded by Microsoft.  I wish they’d bring it back!

There are others out there as well such as this one. There’s also a number of desktop software packages which do the same sorts of things.

If you’re not adept at this, though, you might also consider hiring someone who can assess your unique situation, generate the brand name permutation lists, check them for squatters, and then recommend ongoing strategies to you. As you can see, these guys are clever, and not everyone can think like them.

If you have a major name-brand and are a publicly traded company, it really behooves you to find the cases of cybersquatting associated with your brand names, and force the owners to relinquish them to you (unless it is a “fair use”). This is a necessary part of protecting your marks. Buy up other variations of your domain as well, and 301 redirect all of these back to your main homepage. By doing this you can save money by cutting out the parasites and middlemen, and you can also increase your organic traffic through all those long-tail-brand domain referrals that start rolling up into your homepage.