Small Business Center

Reviews Help Local Businesses Rank Higher on Google, Yahoo

May 23rd, 2008 by Admin

The Local Search, SEO, and Rants blog by Stephen Espinosa has some helpful tips on how local businesses can get higher in search engines. Yahoo actually indexes the text of local business reviews.

So if you have reviews, there are more ways people could search and have your business show up at the top of the list.  This is important for local searches (a local search is when someone searches for a city and/or state along with a phrase, such as “dentist, orem, Utah”).  Google pulls reviews from other web sites and takes reviews into account when deciding where to rank sites.

Yahoo Local Business Reviews

Yahoo local business searches actually search the text of reviews. Example: Someone...

Organic Search Traffic Up

May 16th, 2008 by Admin

This just in today, from Degreesearch.org:

“We are starting to see an increase in the number of users coming to the site through organic search. Google and MSN are running particularly strong relative to what we have seen in the past. Nice work!”

Chandler Horsley, CEO of Lead Media Partners

On line Degrees - Degreesearch.org

Every New Online Business Needs SEO

May 5th, 2008 by Admin

If you’re a new business of any size, that has a web site, your business and marketing plans need to include SEO (search engine optimization). SEOMoz has a great rant about how often startups don’t even mention SEO as part of their strategy.

SEO is how you make sure you’re in search engines and that your site is found for words that relate to your business. Most people find web sites through a search engine, they type in words, usually starting out vague and getting more specific as they go. For any business online optimizing for search engines should be a paramount concern.

But even before that, you’ll want to do some keyword research to see that people are actually searching for or...

How to Reconcile Differences in Web Stats

May 1st, 2008 by Admin

This is a common question - how do you reconcile the differences in web stats. It seems like every analytics program comes up with a different number, which can be frustrating for businesses of all sizes. It’s also a problem with paid search because the numbers you see from your PPC analytics may not match up with the numbers in Google.

OrangeSoda recently hired Clint Eagar who worked for web analytics firm Omniture. I asked him to write a post to try to demystify the discrepancies that are common between different web analytics tools.

I get a lot of questions about why there is a variance between how different web analytics packages report traffic results.

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