This year’s report includes feedback from 34 prominent bloggers and local search experts.  Each factor is graded three ways; 1) the importance of the factor, 2) whether the factor has increased or decreased in importance since last year’s report, and 3) how closely the 34 participants agreed on each factor.

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The reason for this decline is a recent emphasis by the major search engines to not only serve up the most relevant search results, but the most recent as well.  And if  your site isn’t updated with current, relevant information then you’re losing the game to a site that is.

The sad part is that this is something that could be fixed with very little effort and very little expense.

There are a number of excellent, open-source (free!) content management systems available to the small business owner.  If you have some technical skills you can make the switch yourself.  Otherwise, you’ll need to hire someone to help migrate your site to a new platform and teach you how to add new content quickly and easily.

Costs for this can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars depending on how many pages you currently have on your site, what functionality you want and whether or not you use a template or have a new design created for you.

Here are a few of the top open-source content management systems available today.

• WordPress (my favorite)
• Joomla
• Drupal
• Dot Net Nuke
• Expression Engine

I’m sure there are lots of others that are very good but these are the ones we have had experience with.

And if you need some help converting your site give me a call.  I’ll be glad to take a look at it and give you a quote.

Photo Credit: Dinosaur Jr. by desdeaquinet on Flikr

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The biggest factors I see for small businesses are that you no longer have to have a physical office to add your company to their directory.  With these changes Google will allow you to identify a service area and if you work from home or you travel around and don’t really have an office you have the ability to make your address private.

That is going to really open things up for the freelancer and work at home professional.

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There are a lot of interesting implications to Social Search so we will see how this all plays out. I think it’s pretty amazing that when I search for information about a new movie or a restaurant in town I could see reviews, blog posts and other content from people I know, like and trust.

This will have a direct impact on companies who are not paying attention to their online reputation management and addressing concerns in a positive way.

If you are a small business owner it’s time to take the reigns of this use it to your advantage.

To your success,
Ken Partain

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There are lots of links to helpful information so check it out and let me know what you think.  You can leave your notes in the comments section below.

If you would like to have the newsletter delivered directly to your inbox, use the signup form in the right column to register.

Have a great day!

To your success,
Ken Partain

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The value of a new client will determine the decisions you make about pricing your products and services, hiring support staff and how much you will spend on marketing and advertising to attract your ideal client.

Let’s look at an example.  Let’s say you sell widgets.  These widgets cost you $20 to produce and you sell them for $40.  You now have a gross profit of $20 on each widget sold.

Now let’s say a typical client buys one widget a month and stays with your company for 2 years.  Each widget makes $20 in profit times 24 months, which equals $480.  That means that each new client is worth approximately $480 in profit to your small business.

Now how much money would you spend to attract that client? $10? $50? $100?

Let’s look at this from another angle.  If you are spending $1,000 on advertising and marketing and you only attract 2 new clients you are losing money, especially if those new clients don’t buy as many widgets and don’t stay with you quite as long.

Now let’s see what you can do to improve the value of a new client.  If you were to raise the price of your widget just 10% to $44 and your costs remained the same, your profit is now $24 per widget, which bumps the value of a new client up to $576 ($24 profit x 12 widgets x 2 years).

And what if your new client bought 14 widgets per year?  Now the value of a new client is up to $672 ($24 profit x 14 widgets x 2 years).

And what if your new client stayed with you for 2 1/2 years?  Now the value of a new client is $840 ($24 profit x 14 widgets x 2.5 years).

Now how much money would you spend to attract your ideal client?  By making improvements in several areas of your business, you can attract a much more profitable client, which in turn allows you to market your small business more consistently across multiple channels and attract even more clients.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.  Please share them by commenting below.

To your success,
Ken Partain

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With that in mind, we have made some changes to the pricing of our SEO Plans and have added two other options.

First, we have reduced the setup fee on all of our SEO plans.

Second, we have added an SEO Jumpstart plan.  With this plan you will have a one-on-one phone conversation with us to determine the direction you want to go.  We will then conduct our keyword research and optimize the home page of your website.  We will also provide you with a Comprehensive Website Marketing Analysis so you will know exactly how to improve your site’s overall optimization.

In addition to the SEO Jumpstart plan, we are now offering a free 30-minute SEO consultation and online marketing review.  This call will be packed with information to help you optimize your site.  We’ll identify the primary issues affecting the ranking of your site and provide you with guidance to correct those issues.

In our December Monthly Marketing Newsletter I set some goals for our company.  One was to help 100,000 small business owners market themselves more effectively.  The other was to add 100 new clients to our roster in 2010.  My hope is that by reducing the prices of our SEO plans and offering some introductory products, more small businesses can afford to optimize their web sites.

Give me a call at 1-877-334-8022 and schedule your free consultation today.

To your success,
Ken Partain

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The structure of your URL is just as important if not more so than your Title tag when it comes to your on-page content.  The thing you want to remember is to try and use the primary keywords in the naming of your page.  If you are optimizing a site that is already in place, you probably don’t need to worry about renaming the pages, but if you are adding new pages to your site you will want to keep this in mind.

If you are using a content management system or blog software for your site then you probably don’t need to worry about this either because most of them will use the title of your post as part of the URL.  And if you use your primary keywords in the title of your post you’re in pretty good shape.  However, you have to make sure and set it up correctly in order for it to work right.

Here’s an example of a poor URL:  www.yourdomain.com/?id=123.  ?id=123 is the name of the page in this instance.  It doesn’t tell the search engines anything about this page.

Here’s an example of a good URL: www.yourdomain.com/blue-widget-special.  blue-widget-special is the name of the page in this instance and it tells the search engines (and your human visitors) what to expect when they visit that page, a special on blue widgets.

I hope this series has been helpful.  If you have any questions please leave a comment below or get in touch with me.

To your success,
Ken Partain

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Getting visitors to your web site is not generally considered part of the SEO process though it is the main objective.  Without visitors you don’t have the opportunity to grow your business in the very place most people are looking today.

Although you don’t have any direct control of getting traffic to your website, traffic is nevertheless a factor in how well your site ranks.

Sites can get away without any SEO if they are a popular site and get lots of traffic without the benefit of being optimized.

This can happen if you drive a lot of traffic through offline means, but eventually, if you are providing good content and a great user experience then people will start linking to your site and therefore drive additional traffic.

This system begins to feed on itself and it just continues to grow as you add more compelling content which takes us right back to the first part of this series – your on-page content.

To your success,
Ken Partain

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Linking from one web page to another is what has made the Internet what it is today.  Incoming links to the pages on your website are weighted very heavily in the algorithms of all the major search engines.  If there are no links to your site you may rank for a very few terms like your company name, but that’s about it.

Without links to your site, it is as if you are in outer space.  There’s nothing really connecting you to the rest of the world wide web.

There are basically two types of  links, inbound links to the pages on your site and outbound links from the pages on your site to other sites.  You will obviously have more control of your outbound links, but the incoming links are the main thing that will help your pages rank better.

Outbound links

Google’s PageRank puts a very high emphasis on incoming links when it calculates the value of a web page, which determines where it ranks in the search engine results.

Some people will say that outbound links don’t help with your on-page optimization.  I disagree.  Linking to other sites or other pages is supposed to help the reader have a deeper understanding of the material you are presenting. Each link is there to help the reader in some way. When you are a good steward with your outbound links the search engines tend to reward you for that.  Links added just for links sake aren’t necessarily helpful.

The search engines have extremely complicated algorithms that give a score to each link and they can quickly tell if a link is of value or not. That link is also valued based on the anchor text in that link, the words that are highlighted or underlined, that you click on to go to another page.

You have full control of the outbound links on your site. Use them wisely.

Incoming Links

A lot of SEO professionals would not include incoming links in a discussion about on-page optimization. However, there are more than one page on your web site, or there certainly should be, and each of those pages can have links to other content on your own site. The beautiful thing about this is you have full control of the anchor text used in those links and you can use them to help define the other pages on your site.

You see a lot about building your incoming link profile. The more links you get from related websites, the better your site will rank. I read an article recently from Michelle MacPhearson called Link Mixology: The 12 Kinds of Links Your Site Needs. I think it’s a very good explanation of where and how to build your incoming link profile.

If you need help with building incoming links to your site we offer a link-building program that helps get you started on getting quality inbound links to your site.

Tomorrow we are going to wrap up our series with an article on traffic as a ranking factor. If I can help you further with this topic please leave a comment below or send me an email.

To your success,
Ken Partain

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