Margery Spears

Google, Bing and Yahoo offer online business listings to help promote your business to local Internet users. Claiming, adding, and validating your online business listing page in the local business directories can increase your business and website traffic, enhance your search engine optimization efforts, attract new customers, and reduce your marketing costs by increasing your local business’ Internet visibility.

Whether you own a barber shop or a home electronics store, with97% of consumers using the Internet to research products or services in their local area before they buy, and 53% of Bing mobile search queries focusing on local results, maintaining a local search presence for your business is critical to your success.  Fortunately, claiming or setting up your page in local business listings is easy and in most cases free.

Ajax and SEO are like oil and water. They don’t mix. Like with Flash, using Ajax on your site to present non-critical information to viewers can enhance the user experience and add interactivity and pizazz to your site. Using Ajax to completely implement your site design presents challenges for the search engines. However, with the right approach, you can achieve peaceful coexistence between Ajax and SEO.

Before the Internet, business was all about the customer. It still is. Except that now, instead of sharing their experience with their friends and neighbors, your customers can tell the world—or, at least the part of the world with Internet access. In addition to exchanges on social sites like Facebook, online interest groups and discussion forums, online reviews provide another powerful feedback mechanism for both consumers and business owners.

Infographics, those colorful and familiar data charts made popular first by USA Today and now appearing everywhere, are a great way to build your inbound link profile – both inbound link numbers and domain diversity — with very little effort on your part. These graphics, illustrations, and charts appeal to the approximately 65 percent of the general population who are visual learners. We humans are, after all, designed for visual interpretation of data.

Recently, the Confluence Digital team descended on the SMX Advanced conference right here in our own turf in Seattle. Here’s my top 10 list of things that I learned while attending the SEO track, in no particular order.

Bing is becoming a consideration in the search engine market, especially with the Yahoo merger.
Penalties do not usually come from a single infraction, but from an accumulation of issues. Think “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Several speakers, including Matt Cutts, pushed video sitemaps, especially with the new Google TV vertical that will be coming out later this fall. Google will be giving more weight to video sitemaps in the future.