Local search is a valuable resource for any business looking to build a bigger client pool. Is your business located in the major local search listings? I recently ran across this great 8 part list that may help improve your local search traffic and improving your overall business.

1. Make sure that you have a crawler friendly web site

The first step in improving your business performance in local search engines is to make sure that the search engines can easily crawl your site, and identify your business keywords. Minimize the use of tables, and avoid deeply nested tables. Make sure that your business name and address are featured prominently on the page as text, and not hidden from the crawlers in an image file. Your page title should include your business name, address and key words. Place an "H1" header near the top of the page that also has your business name, address, and key words.

2. Include your business address twice on the page

In addition to placing your business address prominently on the page, also include it in the footer. Abbreviate the business state in one of the addresses, and spell it out in the second. Abbreviated states are sometimes misinterpreted by the crawlers. For example, MD represents both a state and a doctor.

3. Check out your business listing on the major search engines

Check out your business listings on Google, Yahoo Local, and MSN Live Search. If your business is not found, you should submit a listing at Google, Yahoo, and Superpages (for Microsoft Live Search).

For each business listing, make sure that your information is correct, your business description is complete, and that it uses the same keywords that you are using on your web site. Make sure that your description has all the information that your potential customers will need to contact you, since people often will not click through to your web site from the local business listing. Include the county in addition to the city on your business listing. Finally, check out any photos of your business on the business directories, and provide better photos where appropriate.

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Webmaster tools from Google are indispensable for people who optimize their web site for indexing with the Google system. Google Analytics is a new statistics and metrics tracking feature offered by the team at the google compound. This free web based analytics software is the perfect tool for you to track your users and web marketing campaigns for all of your web sites and projects.

We wanted to highlight some of the wonderful webmaster-specific metrics available within the Google Analytics system for you, since it offers a lot of easily-accessible information that will enrich the daily online work you're doing and the web sites you are building. Do you know how many of your web site visitors are using IE versus Firefox? And even further, how many of those IE or Firefox users are converting on the goals you have created? Google Analytics will tell you important information like this so you can develop and customize your website for your targeted audience.This also is a helpful feature when building and designing your web project, when you are designing your website, you can prioritize your testing to make sure that the website works on the most popular browsers and operating systems first.

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Even after many years of clean business practices, a single negative event can stain your brand image in the public eye for a long time. Simple things like a negative product review in a blog can be detrimental to your brand, especially when competitors are standing close by to snatch up customers. One way to combat that threat is through a reputation management strategy, which can begin with search engine optimization (SEO).

First, to understand how negative press can get to the top of the search engines results pages (SERPs), let's take a trip down memory lane and revisit the old urban legend of Pop Rocks and Coke. Amidst all the excitement around the popular fizzy candy, in the late 1970s stories began to spread around school playgrounds that, when mixed with soda, Pop Rocks could cause a mini-explosion in your stomach. Teachers overheard and passed on to mothers. The worried mothers then escalated the news to the press, and soon General Foods, the creators of Pop Rocks, had a reputation problem on their hands.

This telephone game of word-of-mouth is replicated online via link-building. First, someone publishes negative comments about your company. As others read the comments, more people start linking to it in blogs and discussion groups. Friends forward to friends, who forward to friends and so on. Next thing you know, the bad press is at the top of the search rankings.

Back in the Pop Rocks days, General Foods responded to the Pop Rocks fiasco with full-page print ads, letters to school principals around the country, and even sent the Pop Rocks inventor door to door to attest to its safety. But what could they have done had they lived in the today's digital world?

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