Geotargeted and Local Search: Engagement Chatter
When dealing with national and international clients, who can and do sell their services around the world, it is incredibly easy to discount the value of geotargeted and local search. In my latest post on RBD Rodeo, I talk about geotargeted and local search from a user’s perspective. While I do offer four takeaways at the end, I found it useful to think from the perspective of a purchaser, which I might have been. (Read the post to find out what actually happened.)
As I continue on my path to a wedding day, I am sure the local search capabilities of Google (my search engine of choice) will become more and more helpful as I look for locations that can hold a reception, perhaps caterers and florists, bands, DJs, musicians, photographers, videographers, and probably a dozen other things we haven’t made up our mind on and will need for our celebration. If you’d like to hear more about geotargeted search, let me know in the comments. I should have more geotargeted thoughts on both blogs in the near future if it’s something you’d want to hear.
I am an SEO Professional.
The consulting firm over at SEOMoz have put together a quiz for people who work in SEO. There are five arbitrary levels defined, based on the number of points each question has been assigned that you answer correctly. I don’t imagine many people will be advertising and linking their quiz results when some of the answers are debatable, though. More discussion on the debate and a couple of people telling their scores is at Sphinn.
I assure you, I am an SEO Professional. And I think that’s quite reasonable, seeing as I’ve not been heavily engaged in international SEO or have a current need to know off the top of my head what search engine is most popular in Korea (it’s Naver). I will admit to getting the following question wrong: “The de-facto version of a page located on the primary URL you want associated with the content is knows [sic] as:” The correct answer: “Canonical version”. If I ever speak to a client and discuss the “de-facto version of a page” as the “canonical version” of that page, I would be doing that client a disservice.
While I think businesses and nonprofits should do their homework and know some SEO and PPC, I do not think a 100% score on a test or a usability expert who engages focus groups is always the best SEO for you. I’ve said previously, “there’s an odd security in having what looks like the perfect search engine optimizer, only on paper.” An SEO may be ideal on paper, but can you work with and understand their language?
How To Rank Highly Without Penalizing Yourself
You can beat a spammer with my post on niche SEO and you can launch a site with a clean URL structure. Now you need to find a way to get the pages you want to be seen to show up for search engine queries.
Block duplicate content with your robots.txt file
You do a search, looking for news or information, and the most relevant result appears to be a blog’s monthly archive. You click on the result and see a month’s worth of posts, and give up looking for the info. Maybe, if you are savvy, you’d have clicked the cache link in Google to have your search terms highlighted. But not likely. When dealing with blogs, consider blocking categories and monthly archives, feed URLs, and possibly even comment folders.
Duplicate content can also come from syndicated content. If you write articles for article directories, or submit press releases, that is great content that can also be posted to your own site. You are best off by altering that content enough to be unique, and/or posting the duplicate content but blocking the spiders from indexing it off of your site. If you’re not familiar with robots.txt, you can always put a meta tag in pages, to have a page not indexed, but still followed to other links, use, meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"
