Local Search Marketing Tactics
This session looked at search marketing tactics that can help companies tap into the ever-elusive local market. Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch, Justin Sanger from LocalLaunch and Matt Van Wagner from Find Me Faster presented their thoughts and ideas on how to tap into the local search market. I found a couple useful ideas from this session. First, the speakers noted many local search engines:
- Dex
- Yahoo! Local
- Ask City
- Google Local
- Citysearch
- Superpages
- Yellow Pages
- Yelp
- Insider Pages
- MojoPages
Second, the speakers noted the importance of simple, optimized pages with global footers that include your address. This gives users a way to find you. In addition, they noted the importance of local link building through sites like business bureaus, city sites, etc.
Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
This session was concerned mainly with mirror sites and sites that display similar content. Shari Thurow and Mikkel Svendsen made a few key points that every site owner should consider. First, check your sites linkage properties using a tool like Yahoo Site Explorer. This tool can help you determine if there is duplicate content on your site. Second, use a host name resolution to fix URL problems. Finally, make sure that if you have duplicate content, like many ecommerce sites, make sure to use wildcards in your robots.txt file. Proper use of the no follow command can enable your site to remove duplicate content from search engines.
Links Q & A
I attended two sessions that were a question and answer format on links. The first session was moderated by SEO’s, the second by representatives from the engines themselves. These sessions provided some insight into the engines themselves. The engines recommended using links only to sites that are on topic with proper anchor text. Always use stable URL’s to help aid in the fight against spam sites. In addition, Live Search noted that their new webmaster tools are now available in beta to aid programmers and SEO’s alike.