Consumers often look for “trusted” methods to narrow down a list of potential businesses such as online reviews, referrals from associations, etc. “Trust builders” on a web site (such as a “Badge” from a respected verification system like VeriSign) can also help.

Most Americans are familiar with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and most tend to trust the BBB.

The BBB offers an Accreditation process and I’ve seen that it can deliver benefits including SEO benefits (improvements in organic search results)

About BBB Accreditation

You can apply to be BBB accredited. They evaluate your business against their Standards for Trust, including Honest Advertising, Transparency, Safe Guarding Privacy, etc

To apply you must be in business at least one year and have no unanswered complaints. The cost is based on the number of employees starting with at $440 first year (which includes a processing fee) followed by $390 next year.

What You Get…

A BBB Accredited Seal for your web site that allows web visitors to access your Business Review on the BBB site. The benefits of this seal (badge) include the perception of Trust that many consumers associate with BBB accreditation. I believe you can also use this badge on some social sites and search engine listings like your Google Places listing which could help entice those visitors to contact you. You also get Badges for your building, print advertising, etc.

You’ll be listed on the BBB web site and your accreditation status is highlighted. Site visitors can also choose to browse through a list of only Accredited businesses. The BBB web is a very popular web site used by some consumers to find companies to do business with and even more often to check out companies being considered for complaints etc.

BBB Accredited Business Highlighted in Listing. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Click for an example of a list of Accredited carpenters

Accreditation Could Help Increase Organic Search Positions. There’s an active link to your web site from the BBB site. I’ve checked and these listings are search friendly so these active links from the BBB site, which is usually considered a very strong, trusted link by Google, may not only bring prospective clients to your site, the link may help your web site’s search positions (rankings).

People who search for businesses on the BBB site have the option to choose to only look at businesses that are Accredited. Plus the BBB now offers mobile apps to make researching businesses easier from these devices.

Accreditation Could Help Local Search Positions Too. The listing on the BBB site shows at least some of your business name, address and phone number. Again these listings are search engine friendly and may help your local search engine listings (such as a Google Places listing) rank better too.

Dispute Resolution Help. The BBB may receive complaints about your business. They will display valid, documented complaints in your listing. If someone sees your business listing with no complaints that could help. On the other hand, if you ever do get a complaint, resolve it quickly. Complaint resolution is displayed on your listing which could help convey that you are responsive to customer complaints. As an accredited BBB business they are available to act as an intermediary for you and your customer.

Your Category(S) May Appear In Search Results
In doing some searches for one of our client’s important keywords I noticed the search listings below in the screen shot for searches on “Warehousing Services in CT”.

BBB Directory Results in a Search Engine listing. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Notice the 3 listings from the BBB for Accredited Warehouses near cities in CT in top organic positions just below the sponsored ads.

I’ll bet plenty of people click through to those BBB listings because most people know who the BBB is and the listings mention “Accredited” warehouses and “trusted warehouses”. If someone clicks on one of these listings they are presented with a list of accredited BBB businesses in the category. I’ve seen similar results in other markets.

If you see some similar BBB listings in the search results for some of your important keywords then this is all the more reason to consider accreditation, especially if the BBB listings are appearing higher in the search results than your own listing.

Free BBB Listing Option

There’s also a free listing option that doesn’t include most of the features of an accredited listing, but it does include name and address. Your business may already be listed, so check on the BBB site in your area.

To find your local BBB web site Search on “bbb, State”

Here’s what you’ll learn in the first two articles:

• Organic Keywords: The First Step In Search Engine Optimization

I cover how to use Google Analytics to choose the organic keyword phrases to focus on first in your optimization efforts: those keywords already contributing to the business goals. We then look at how to use Google analytics to help “map” those keywords to existing pages on the site for optimization. Read it >>

• How To Prioritize Keywords For Optimization Based On Organic Competition

Building on the previous article I show you how I prioritize the keywords to focus on by evaluating the difficulty of reaching top results. Read it >>

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I’ll be speaking in this session: Increase Your Post Click Conversion Performance on Tuesday at 11:30 am.

Session Overview: Sure, you’ve figured out how to funnel all of the traffic to your site. But are you paying attention to those post-click behaviors? The panelists in this session will examine ways to keep the process going. Know how to convert traffic once they make it to your site.

I’ll be presenting…

“How To Increase Conversions For Organic Keywords”

• How to Compare Keyword Conversion Rates and Select Important Keywords to Focus On.
• How to Check for Landing Page issues that hurt conversion rates for Organic Keywords.

Click for more information and to register

Hope to see you there!

Why Site/Page Load Speed Is Important

Slow Load Speeds Can Reduce Leads And Sales. It’s an important user experience factor. When a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.

Load speed is especially important for the pages people first land on from search results (and other traffic sources). If it takes too long to load many people will simply hit the back button and click on another search result.

In Google’s Search Advertising PPC Network (AdWords) poor load speed is a one the factors that can lower your Quality Score leading to lower ad positions at a higher cost-per-click (CPC). Google will even stop ads from running if the load speed is too slow.

In short slow load speeds can hurt conversions such as the number of leads or sales your web site generates.

It’s An Organic Ranking Factor In Google. Over a year ago Google stated that loads speeds are a ranking factor for organic search positions.

Load Speed Tools From Google

Google has a few tools you can use to check load speed and to help you fix issues.

Site Performance Report. In Google’s Webmaster Tools there’s a Site Performance Report that displays your web sites average load speed over time and compares it to other sites:

Site Performance Report in Google’s Webmaster Tools. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Page Speed Tool. Google offers a tool called Page Speed that analyzes the content of a web page and generates suggestions to help make that page load faster.

Page Speed is available as a plug-in for Google’s Chrome browser of for FireFox. Or you can use the online version of Page Speed. Just enter a page URL in the online version and after a short time you’ll be presented with a list of prioritized suggestions that should make the page load faster.

Google’s Page Speed Report. CLICK TO ENLARGE

George Aspland’s Articles on Search Engine Land

Improve the visibility of your LinkedIn content with search engines as well as within the LinkedIn community.

Increase the exposure of your LinkedIn updates.

Possibly help to increase rankings of the web content you link to in LinkedIn updates.

You’ll Learn About…

How to Setup a LinkedIn Company Page and Associate Your Employees With It.

Have Your Employees Optimize Their Public Profiles. Having your employees optimize their profiles helps make the content on their profile more visible to others within the LinkedIn community and with search engines.

Have Your Employees Share Your Updates On Their Profiles. When you have important updates to share ask some or all of your employees to post the update on their LinkedIn Profiles.

For example when you want to announce that helpful video you put up on YouTube or that great how-to article that was just published ask your employees to Share the Update on their profiles. This can get your update in front of thousands of people on LinkedIn who may in turn share it, bookmark it, Like it, link to it, etc.

Having a company profile with associated employees each with optimized profiles who are active with a number of connections can increase the visibly of your content both on LinkedIn and with search engines and give you a effective online networking tool to communicate with hundreds or thousands of connections.

Sharing updates with these connections should help increase awareness of your messages and the web content you link to in your updates and possibly increase the rankings of that content as your connections share, bookmark/like, and link to your content.

Read How To Use LinkedIn To Improve Organic Visibility

However there are significant differences reported by position in this study compared to other similar studies. One of the other studies was conducted within the past year and one was reported in 2007.

But what’s clear by looking at the three of the studies is the advantage of reaching the top 2 or 3 organic rankings on Google. The top 3 spots get between 35% and 58% of the clicks across the three studies.

Rob looks closely at what could account for the differences in the numbers reported in the studies and finds a number of possibilities. It’s an interesting read if you want to hear about how widely these types of studies can vary and some of the reasons behind the differences.

But the bottom line is affirmation of SEO 101: Get to the first page, and get as close to the top as possible!

Read Rob Young on Search Engine Watch

Google Not Showing Some Descriptive Info Owners Input in Listings

If you haven’t noticed, Google Places listings have suddenly gotten a makeover to a much simpler, much sparser layout such as below

Notice what’s missing? As Google explains in it’s user forum, “The following info you provide may not appear on your Place page” including…

Email address
Additional details
[some industry specific details]

In one of Google’s forums it was mentioned that the additional details are no longer displayed because of spamming. Google goes on to explain “just because we’re not showing it, doesn’t mean it’s not helpful for us to have… it’s all still used to help us understand more about your business” We take that to mean that the additional info we develop and add to a listing still helps rankings. However we and many are complaining to Google that this additional information we develop is added to the listing to provide useful information to prospective customers who view the listing pages. Without these additional details the only owner provided content is a 200 character description along with photos and videos. We can only hope that Google will rethink this.

Review Snippets From Other Web Sources Have Been Removed

In the past Google would display snippets of reviews from sources such as Yelp, Superpages, etc. No more. As Google explains “…based on careful thought about the future direction of Place pages, and feedback we’ve heard over the past few months, review snippets from other web sources have now been removed from Place pages”

The scuttlebutt is that Google did this to head off an FTC investigation from complaints from those 3rd party review sites that Google shouldn’t be allowed to display them in their listings.

In any case, now only snippets from reviews that were input in Google Paces by other Google Account holders will be displayed on a listing. Although there may be links in the Reviews section that allow a viewer to click to see reviews from other sources.

This means it has gotten more important to make sure that you get at least some good reviews input directly into your Google Place listings so that snippets from those reviews will appear in your listing. However it remains helpful to get good reviews in any of the important Citation sites for your market (see more in the next section about Citations sites). Good reviews should help entice those who read the reviews to consider doing business with you. In addition, we believe Google will continue to read these reviews which may help rankings for your Google Paces listings too.

Citation Sites No Longer Displayed

Google used to display a number of web pages in a section named “More about this place”. These were some of the Citation sites that mentioned and often linked to the organization described in the listing. We’re not sure why Google decided to remove this section. Perhaps they thought it made it too easy for marketers to see what citation sites might be affecting their listing leading to spamming attempts. We did in fact look at these sites to see which sites were important to update or submit to. However we have more comprehensive methods to discover the important citation sites for a market within a territory.

After years of declining use Google pulled the plug on the Google Directory.

The Google Directory was based on the Open Directory Project (OPD),  a volunteer, human edited directory of the web that has been used as the underlying database for numerous web directories for years. Unfortunately OPD has struggled in recent years to keep up with the increased number of updates and submissions.

We liked the Google Directory because you could browse the listings in a category in PageRank order, meaning that the online magazines at the top of a listing, for example, had the highest PageRank. With Google’s Directory gone you can search for and browse through categories in OPD, but only in alphabetical order.

I haven’t checked to see if Google is still displaying the OPD site description as the description in some of its search results or not. In some cases Google may display the description for a site from the Google directory as the listing snippet (this usually only happens for home pages). However checking Google’s webmaster help pages I still see the following mentioned in pages that were updated since the Google Directory was taken down

“…the title from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), can appear in Google search results.”

For more information on this and how to stop Google from displaying the OPD title see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35624#2

• Improve visibility for target keyword phrases.
• Obtain traffic for additional (long tail) keyword searches.
• Helps attract more incoming links to a site.
• Assist in building awareness and reputation.
• Increasing targeted traffic from related sites.
• Helps make a website more unique and useful.

In this article I wrote for Search Engine Land I cover the steps we take with article marketing. These steps have been developed from years of examining what competitors of our clients have done to become the ranking and traffic leaders in their industries. Effective article marketing is a key strategy for many of them.

Covered in this Part 1 Article:

• EFFECTIVE Article Marketing Is NOT About Submitting To Article Submissions Sites!
• Step 1: Start Writing Quality, Useful Articles For Your Own Web Site
• Make it easy for your article readers to click through to related products and services.
• How To Find Article Ideas
• But I Can’t (Or Don’t Have The Time) To Write Articles

Read “A Step By Step Guide To
Effective Online Article Marketing – Par 1”

Part 2 will be live on Search Engine Land around September first.

• Meta Keywords
• XML Site Maps or Submitting to Search Engines:
• Link Title Attributes:
• Header Tags Like H1 or H2
• Keyworded Alt Text on Non-clickable Images:
• Keyword-stuffed Content
• Optimizing for General or Peripheral Keywords
• Targeting the Same Keywords on Every Page
• Focusing on Ads as Links
• Mad-lib Doorway Pages
• Linking to Google or Other Popular Websites
• Redirecting a Keyworded Domain to Your Real One
• Republishing Only Others’ Stuff
• Making Minor Changes to Freshen Content
• Nofollowing Internal Links
• Main Navigation That Links to Every Page:

Read “16 SEO Tactics That Will NOT Bring Targeted Google Visitors”

For More info

SEO Myths. Which myths do these senior SEO’s agree are wasteful pursuits? A look at SEO tactics taht four senior SEO’s agree are a waste of time. This article links to and summaries some of the article below

36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To

36 MORE SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To

Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?
8 SEO Myths Debunked

Do XML sitemaps improve rankings?