And with the competition in organic search getting tougher everyday, it’s always good to find ways to make your business appear in search results like doing LOCAL SEO.

Local SEO has been desirable in the past years as it allows businesses to penetrate less competitive markets but converts well.

See how these bunch of plumbers appear in the map of Los Angeles.

There’s a lot really but people usually narrow down their search for a business, like in the example above, they will search for a much specific place near to their location, which will result into other businesses listed get better targeted prospective clients.

Tips on Local Search Engine Optimization

Google Places – leading the list, a business should claim its location in the map by creating a profile via Google Places. It will include your business name, contact details such as phone numbers and postal address, a description of your business and a few other details like operating hours, payment options, etc. Make sure to list complete details of your business that will let people know what you have to offer.

With Google places, you need to verify that your business is legit, wait for a business card to be delivered to your specified postal address. I’d suggest doing this one as it is more likely to appear at the top of people’s search results than verifying thru phone. Unless you can do tricks like the one in the image below:

Citations – it’s advisable to submit your business to as many online local directories as you can and gain customer reviews in those pages. Some nice sites to include are Yelp, Zagat and CitySearch. Even if Google Places stops stealing reviews from third party sources, a nice commentary about your business will surely do something good.

Google+ Pages for Business – I know that this one serves it main purpose, a vital presence for better rankings in search results. If you have added your business in Google Places, Google+ Pages for Business can pull the data from it upon adding then you can share it to your circles, post relevant information on what you offer and get better recommendations.

Local SEO has a long way to go, so start building your credibility by gaining trust from people within your area. Make use of all its potentials.

Gone are the happy days for Facebook marketers that will create a Facebook fan page to publish updates as part of his efforts to promote something as the old ruling that it will immediately appear in your fans news feed is gone. And that is because of – Edgerank.

What is Facebook Edgerank?

Edgerank is Facebook’s algorithm that determines which posts get shown to whom in the Newsfeed. Facebook page will be given a score by Facebook Edgerank, and the higher it scores, the higher is the possibility that your updates will reach your fans via their news feed.

The Facebook Edgerank Formula Explained

Affinity x Weight x Time Decay = EdgeRank

Affinity Score – Fans of your page who interacts with content posted in your page is more likely to see updates in their news feed.

Weight – Each interaction made by a user in Facebook has different weights. The one that weighs more gets the better score. I here, commenting instead of liking creates a higher level of interaction. Why is that? Because creating a comment will consume someone more time than hitting the thumbs up button to like something.

Time – The web today is about freshness.  Whoever delivers the news first and regularly, gets the bigger audience.

These elements multiplied to each other is what composes an Edge that will decide the priority of your updates. Once a certain threshold (which no one knows) is reached, your updates will appear in the “Top News” feed.

The event will be held at Firmalino Hall, School of Urban and Regional Planning, UP Diliman, Quezon City. It will start at 9am.

MORCon 2011 is free and exclusive to all members of SEO Organization Philippines and will be presenting an all-star line up of speakers.

Programme:

0800-0900:  Registration

0900-0930:  Opening Remarks

0930-1000:  Website Audit – Site Analysis and Reporting by Sheila Dela Pena – Directwithhotels.com, Online Marketing Junior Manager

1000-1030:  How To Build an Authority Site By Ed Pudol – CEO of Lexorsoft.net

1030-1100:  MORNING BREAK & SOCIALIZATION BREAK

1100-1130:  Viral Marketing Strategies and Content Generation by Jason Acidre – KaisertheSage.com, Marketing Consultant of Doubledot Media

1130-1200:  Social Media Optmization Mistakes to Avoid by Ester Del Fierro – Directwithhotels.com, Online Marketing Manager

1200-1300:  LUNCH BREAK

1300-1330:  How To Bulletproof Your Content and Survive Any Algorithmic Change By Kim Tyrone Agapito – KimOfTheWorld.com and ArticleScholar.com

1330-1400:  SEO Mistakes To Avoid -Learn from the Darkside by Mark Acsay – SEO Consultant

1400-1430:  Pay Per Click (PPC) Strategies by Juanito Jacela – CellConversion.com – PPC Strategist

1430-1500:  Surprise Juicy Internet Marketing Topics by Myles Vives – WebsiteTrafficAttraction.com COO

1500-1530:  AFTERNOON SNACK & SOCIALIZATION BREAKSpecialist

1530-1600:  Alfred Palconit – Branders.com – Senior SEO

1600-1630:  From Local SEO To International SEO Strategies by Benj Arriola – InternetMarketingInc.com – 2007 SEO World Champion

1630-1800:  Q&A Panel

1800-1900:  DINNER & SOCIALIZATION

1900-onwards:  Election of New Officers

If you are into internet marketing, Google Plus will surely play a big role in the industry so you should have a good knowledge of how to use it on your campaigns.

Google Plus Tips

Your Google Plus Profile – your profile will be the center of all your activity in Google+. Make sure that you fill out the about section. Make a good introduction of yourself and utilize the usage of the Links section in the right side of your about page. You can check what I did in my about page.

Import Your Existing Friends – there’s no harm in socializing with people you already know. Google Plus gives you the options of adding friends via their suggestions option or importing contacts from your hotmail and yahoo email.

Create Circles That Will Easily Identify Audience – In a social network like Twitter, we sometimes get tons of updates when we follow a lot of people which is annoying. With the Google Plus Circles, we can group people. In my account, I group people as Clients, Bloggers, SEO Pros, Online Media, Extended Network, Friends and Family. With this, I can choose easily the exact group of people that can relate to what I am sharing.

Spark Up Things – use the Sparks feature to start discussion of things you share in common with the people in your circles. This is a good thing to build followers of your streams, and eventually show that you are an expert in the field. Sparks is a good thing to grab the latest articles of a certain topic from the search results without leaving Google+.

Hangout with People – this is a video conferencing feature that enables you to speak with multiple people at one time. You can do this for online meetings or for remote client presentations.

Google Plus tricks

Text Formatting -

• *asterisks* makes bold;
• _underscores_ makes italics;
• and -dashes- makes a strikethrough

Shortcut Keys -

• Q to open chat
• K scroll up within a single post
• J scroll down within a single post
• Return or Enter Start a comment
• Tab and Return End a comment
• Space Bar Scroll down your stream

Chrome Extensions for Google+

Helper for Google Plus – share / send posts to Twitter, get desktop notifications on new posts, translates post with Google translate. You can check it out here.

+Photo Zoom – zoom photos and profile pics when hovered. You can check it out here.

This announcement was in contrary to their blog post a year ago wherein they said that they will continue its service to the webmaster community.  Now they have realized that having two portals for a single source for organic results will not do any good for them so they have decided to let Bing Webmaster Tools as the replacement for Site Explorer.

Hermant Minocha, Yahoo! Site Explorer Product Manager, blogged: “In a large part of the world, we have not yet transitioned to Microsoft search platform. Hence, it is important that Yahoo! continues to receive your site/sitemap submissions so that search results from Yahoo! are fresh and relevant for markets that have not switched over. In order to continue to receive relevant organic traffic from Yahoo! search results, we encourage you to continue using Site Explorer as you have in the past until we fully switch over to Microsoft search platform for organic results.”

“We anticipate that later this year, Yahoo!’s organic results will be powered by Microsoft’s search platform in all parts of the world. After that point, any optimization that you do on [the] Bing Webmaster Center tool will be reflected in Yahoo! organic search results,” Minocha said.

Small businesses online has the same potential as their bigger competitors because they only have to have a good site and good products and services to entice customers to buy from them. When marketing offline, you have to have a good place for your business. If you are selling products, you need display cases for them and whatnot. On the other hand, if you are going to solely sell your products online, you would only need a place to store them saving you a lot of money.

If you have built your site to make it more appealing to search engines, you can even beat your competitors even if they paid more for the building of their site. You do not need a flashy website to have good Google rankings but you should also consider how your customers would like the layout of your site. It is best if you would work with a web developer and a programmer who knows how to make the site easy for search engine bots to read. The easier it is for the robots to read your site, the better chance you have of ranking well for the keyword you are targeting.

All in all, going online and expanding your network online is the best way for small business owners to level the playing field. With good search engine optimization techniques, they can easily attain good Google or Yahoo rankings which would result to more exposure for their brand and thus increasing sales. It can be done by working with a good SEO company which is not afraid to take on the challenge of taking an unknown brand and making it popular online.

Viral marketing is called that because if it is successful, it could easily spread like a virus. This is a good way to place your brand where you want your probable costumers to see them. Plus, you do not have to spend millions of dollars to have a successful viral marketing campaign as part of your social media marketing. With the widespread use of the Internet, more people can watch a good viral marketing campaign than an ad shown during the Super Bowl.

There is no quick recipe you can follow though to make your advertising campaign to go viral. Sometimes, even the most planned advertising stunts do pan out so well while some hastily made videos shared on YouTube could reach millions of views in a matter of days. Although there’s no recipe for success in viral marketing, you can follow some quick tips to make sure that your viral marketing campaign would not be a big flop.
First of all, be sure that what you are promoting is a good one. Your marketing campaign might get a lot of attention from people but it would be useless if the first hundred customers or so come out with negative reviews of your product or services.

Another thing that you have to look into is your site’s resources. If all goes according to plan and your marketing campaign becomes a viral hit, your site would receive thousands of visitors. If your hosting account only has limited bandwidth allocation, your site could go down which is never a good thing especially during that time span when your viral marketing campaign is at its peak or is about to peak. If that happens, you could end up losing a lot of potential customers.

Remember that the chance of making it big with just one shot at viral marketing might not be enough so try and try again if you fail. And don’t forget about search engine optimization since that is one long-term solution to ensuring your brand’s popularity on the Internet.

Key Features:

• Enable visitors to find the right products faster
• Filter results by category, price, brand or other attributes
• Provide user-friendly spelling options and synonyms
• Increase website conversions and sales
• Boost or promote chosen products within search results
• Deploy search solution in days, and scale effortlessly
• Customize, track, and optimize performance

“Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too,” Google says. “Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers. Google Commerce Search is hosted by and uses Google search technology to make online retail searching both fast and customizable — visitors to your online store can sort by category, price, brand or any other attribute.”

Watch this video to see how it works:

Advanced Link Manager – Analyze your website’s link popularity, find link partners and valuable information about them.
Product Page: http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com

Rank Tracker SEO Tool – Rank Tracker is an all-in-one rankings monitoring SEO tool for webmasters and professional SEOs who need to monitor their site’s positions in more than 250 search engines.
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/

SERank – RAGE SERank will monitor search engine rankings for any number of keywords and display changes in a web site’s search engine rankings over any point of time.
Product Page: http://www.ragesw.com/products/search-engine-rank.html

Advanced Web Ranking – Advanced Web Ranking is a search engine ranking software that emulates a manual search through each search engine. It works exactly like if you were manually checking your keywords ranking position via a browser.
Product Page: http://www.advancedwebranking.com/

Link Assistant – A search engine optimization software program designed to automate the many tedious link building tasks us SEOs need to do on a daily basis. A complete, feature-rich, easy-to-use environment.
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/

iWeb SEO Tool – Quickly and easily optimize your iWeb based website for search engines then publish directly to your iDisk or FTP server without ever leaving the application.
Product Page: http://www.ragesw.com/products/iweb-seo-tool.html

SEO Spyglass – SEO SpyGlass is an extremely powerful competition research tool that is amazingly easy to use. In three simple steps SEO SpyGlass will show you exactly how your competitors got top positions in search engines so you can learn how they do it, improve on it, and get your own site ahead of them, in 232 local and international search engines!
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/

WordButler – A wordtracker competitor specifically designed for mac users.
Product Page: http://www.wordbutler.com/

For years now, the country has been competing with other countries like India in cornering outsourcing contracts. And the good news is that the country is competing well thanks to the many factors that help the Philippines maintain its comparative edge against other leading BPO providers like India. Here is a listing of the country’s strengths and in what sectors can the Philippines truly prove its mettle.

• · Low Infrastructure Costs. Here is one area where the country can show its edge. Office spaces and real estate properties in the country are minimal if you compare the prices to US real estate prices. Real estate prices in Metropolitan Manila are considered low if compared to other international markets. But if the prices in greater Manila still sting the budget, provincial locations are great choices as well. Real estate prices are significantly lower, like Subic, Cebu and Southern Luzon.
• · Government support is evident. One notable government move is to support 100,000 Filipinos thru scholarships. These scholarships will ensure that there will be a continuing pool for contact centers and BPO centers.
• · American-honed work culture. Since the country has been under American rule for many years, the workforce has assimilated some of the American culture, thus allowing the workforce to know and understand where their American customers are coming from.
• · The literate workforce. Companies that will look at the opportunities that can be provided by the Philippines will benefit from the Philippine’s high quality knowledge workers. The Philippines is the second largest English-speaking country and the country also boasts 94 percent literacy rate. Data suggests that more Philippine students are enrolled in the universities than in most European countries. This suggests the quality of education and the motivation of the students.

More importantly the, the Philippines and the country’s BPO providers is your ideal choice to handle your company’s outsourcing needs because of the ethics of the Filipino employees. Filipino employees can be the best workers as most of the Filipinos have Catholic upbringing. Their innate morals and ethics due to their beliefs manifests well in the workforces’ work functions. The Filipino workforce is known for being patient and accommodating thus making the Filipino workforce an excellent choice for your outsourcing needs.