Anointed CEO

Well at least that’s the promise of Universal Business Listings.

UBL will list your business  to top online directories and local directories. These includes, all the major Online Yellow Pages, Search Engines, industry directories and 411 directory assistance.

Being listed on those directories is free but I strongly believe in the old adage “Time is Gold” and it’s wise to pay $30 for their submission service than do it by yourself manually.

UBL does not guarantee though that you’ll be immediately listed. Directories has its own schedule of data updates before they include new listing.

There is an annual fee of $18. According to UBL, most directories requires a re-listing the data annually.

Still, this is a great deal I will say.

I wish though that they also submit to some review site like yelp.com and to other smaller industry specific directories.

Great tip from Local Na8ion.

Oh great. I found a podcast from Duct Tape Marketing with Google’s Head of Web Spam Team, Mr. Matt Cutts.

Here’s an excerpt that I like the most:

“…If it’s good for eye ball, it’s probably good for search engines.”

Search engine optimization is less stressful if only most webmasters will follow that advice and stop playing the game.

Go ahead and listen here on how to have a successful search engine marketing campaign.

Choosing the domain name for you business is not difficult if only there’s not much pollution in search engine marketing industry.

There’s a little debate if domain name is a factor in search engine ranking.

The very reason domain name exist, is for people to remember.

It’s easier to remember “yahoo.com” than “69.46.103.131″ isn’t?

With that in mind, here are my advices in choosing the right domain name for your business:

• The domain name must be easily to remember.

• The domain name must be easily to spell.

• Avoid using dash (-) if possible. Use it only once if necessary.

• If your customers are local or national market, use country code top-level domains (ccTLD). Examples are “.us” for United States and “.ca” for Canada. This way, search engines can automatically know your target visitors are.

• Use your business name us domain name.

As you see, those advices are mostly common sense and not complicated. Go ahead and register your domain name to registrar like GoDaddy.

To improve the ranking of your business website on local searches, you have to tell search engines like Google that your website targets local customers.

One basic optimization is to put your business address, including the zip code, and its phone number in your website in text format and not in a picture or image. This makes your information crawlable by search bots.

This tip seems obvious but you’ll be surprised how many small business website I’ve seen have their contact information in the image or inside a flash animation.

It’s best to put your business address and other contact information at the footer of each page of your site. This is on top of the full information at your main “Contact Us” page.

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Here’s the video of Matt Cutts, Google’s head of WebSpam team. He gave some tips for small business owners in optimizing their website also some general search engine optimization ideas. This video was taken last quarter of 2007.

The big “G” (Google) uses a snippet to give searchers a preview of what a certain website has to offer. These are text normally taken from the text surrounded by meta description tag. It looks similar to this:

<meta name="description" content="Free Internet marketing tips for local and business owners. How to beat your competitors using new marketing strategies. Marketing your small business for BIG profits." />

That’s the description of this blog’s homepage.

Since it’s the text being displayed in search engine results, it is imperative to give serious thoughts when writing it so your customers will click your link among other 10 results. Many users will only search one to two times in Google and if they can’t find what they’re look for, they will assume the information is not available online.

So you should take every opportunity to improve your chances that will help your small and local business website to get more traffic.

How can you increase your Click Through Rate (CTR)?

1. Use the keywords or phrase on your description that your potential customers uses to search on your product or services. Google highlight any word that matches the users query. The more highlight the more your link will get attention.

2. Use a call to action like “Click here”, “Download it”, “Get it”, etc. Of course you have to give what you’ve promised on your description page once the user arrived at your landing page.

3. Use appropriate enticing words like “Free“, “Tips“, “Secrets Revealed“, etc. Did you noticed my description?

Think of your description as an ad copy in a crowded ad space. Your customers have a lot of options. To make matter worst, you only have couple of seconds to convince them to click the link to your site.

Note: Your description should accurately describe what the content of a page is. Don’t trick users just to get them to your site and then hope that they will buy from you.

Go ahead and try these tips and enjoy more targeted customers to your website.

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There’s no question that html title tag is one of the most important element in onsite search engine optimization.

If you’ve no idea what it is, check your web page source code and just above the code, you should see similar to this:

<title> Anointed CEO </title>

The title appears on user’s browser title bar. It’s also the text that most search engine use in listing search results.

How important is the title Tag?

Search Engine Checks Title Tag to validate the content of a page
The core information in your web page should accurately reflect on your title. If your in a business of selling dog food. You should have at least that phrase on your title tag. Example of your title could be “Dog Food and Health Care Store” or “Affordable Dog Food Store“. If you would like to target local customers, you may want to have title like “Dog Food Store in Calgary“, “Affordable Dog Food and Supplies in Calgary, Alberta“, or “Calgary Dog Food Store“. Every page of your website must have a unique title based on the content.

I highly recommend using a catchy title so you have higher chance that searchers will click on your link from the search engine results list. Use the terms or lingo your customer use if possible.

Upper or lower cases doesn’t matter on Search Engines. It is not good though to have title all in upper case. Some Internet users interpret upper case as yelling which will not help your small business in anyway.

How long your title is should be?

Many people stuffed their title with keywords they want their site to rank on. Like “Dog Food Food for you Dog Dog Food Store Affordable Dog Food“. You may not be penalized search engines by doing it but I don’t think it will increase your chance to rank or click through rate. It’s annoying for users to see this kind of title from list.

Five to eight words should be enough to describe the content of a web page. Write the title in a manner it is pleasant to read.

The bottom line is, your html title tag should be for your customers first and search engine second. If your title will appeal to your customers it will likely to appeal to search engines too.