Google Places Page Tune Up – Local Business SEO

Posted on 27. Aug, 2010 by Tracy Sigler in Blog, SEO, Small Business Tools

For the basics on listing your local small business on Google Places see our earlier video. Below are some of the key points points for tuning up your Google Places page to get great local SEO results.

Get Some Great Reviews

One important point I forgot to mention is this video about Google Places is that you should encourage your favorite to write a positive reviews for your business. Just navigate to your page, click the “Link” link near the top right, copy it and paste in an email to some good folks.

Company / Organization

Use keywords in this field that you think your target audience will use when they are searching. For example: “Acme Corp – Widgets in Asheville.” (more…)

Google Font Directory & Previewer, Making Web Design & SEO Easier?

Posted on 08. Aug, 2010 by Tracy Sigler in Blog, SEO

Web design is hard. Years ago web designers had to make some tough choices when it came to typography on websites. You couldn’t just use any font you wanted for headlines or body text because unless the viewers of your site had the same fonts loaded on their machines they would get substitutes. And who knows what that would look like. So you chose from a short list of “web safe” fonts, standard fonts that everyone should have. If you insisted on controlling the fonts you could use graphics instead, but search engines can’t “read” images. Later, new ways of coding web pages (stylesheets) made it possible to use text for search engines and graphics for viewers, but it takes time to load images and fast loading pages are now an important SEO factor. More recently the use of Flash to replace text via some fancy coding solved most of those issues, and kept the text flexible. But now there’s something even better…

Google has created a Font Directory where anyone can access a growing list of fancy fonts. So a designer can code a website and specify any font in Google’s Font Directory and the viewer’s browser will go get that font to display it on the page. The only downside I see right now is that the number of fonts is rather limited, but it seems like a move in the right direction. According to Google “all fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers.” Maybe they can change that policy or also add premium fonts eventually. Or maybe they are just doing this to make indexing the World’s information easier. Surely, no one cares more about “search engine optimization” (SEO) than the big G.

Anyone using the Font Directory yet?

Google Font Directory

Google Font Previewer

Collateral Damage in Google’s War Against Affiliate Marketers on AdWords

Posted on 29. Jan, 2010 by Tracy Sigler in Advertising

Yeah, that’s a long headline. But it’s the truth, Ruth. Don’t let the Google Goliath kick sand in your face! Watch the video to hear the whole story. The entire email exchange between Google Adwords staff and me is below.

This is happening to a lot of people. Read Google’s own forums to see how many people are having their pay-per-click Adwords accounts shut down even though they have done nothing wrong. I’m glad they turned this account back on, but I’m disappointed they didn’t address their original, and incorrect, claim that my account was “related to another account, which has repeatedly violated our Landing page policy and site guidelines.”

Instead of admitting that they had made a mistake they said the site had “low landing page score” because it was “down” when they reviewed it. There is no evidence of that. Adwords always indicated a Landing Page Quality Score of 7 or higher.

I waited almost two weeks before asking Google’s customer service to check into it. They replied within a day. Their responsiveness was appreciated, but their response was not. I was going to bold highlights and insert some jokes, but I think I’ll let the emails speak for themselves.

See the entire email thread after the jump. (more…)