The search engine behemoth Google announced this week that they will be adding the hours and reviews of local businesses in a city or town to their local search results.  Now you will not have to click on a web site address, wait for the page to load, and try to find out the hours, directions, or reviews of the business.  Google provides all of that for you.

Google does not do this automatically though – a business needs to register all of this information with the search engines first.  Putting up a small website is not enough anymore for businesses – now there are Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts that need to be managed.

Feel free to contact us at sales@ladwebdesign.com if you want more information on how you attain success on the internet.  Follow us on http://www.twitter.com/ladwebdesign because you will find out we are real people with great information to share.

Google Alerts are an invaluable way to keep tabs of mentions of your own name, your company name, industry news, competitors, and many other useful bits of information.  Google Alerts may be found here:  http://www.google.com/alerts You need to first sign in with a Google account, then just insert the keywords that you want to research.

This is important (and easy!) to do because if someone is talking about you or your company in a blog posting or forum – you want to know about it in a timely manner!

A while back I googled someone’s name because I wanted to call them and didn’t feel like going through my stack of my business cards.  I just thought I would enter this person’s name into the search engines and I couldn’t believe what came up in the search engine page.  This person had a small website which had not been updated in a while which appeared lower on the page, and a scathing report had been filed on Ripoffreport.com – it was listed first on the search engine page for this person’s name.  Ripoffreport has a page rank of 8 – a high page rank and it is very difficult to get that kind of posting buried in the search engines.  Believe me, you definitely don’t want a posting on Rip Off Report to show up first as the first result in a search engine.

People in general are increasingly turning to the web for their information.  I have used the web to find reviews of products, services, and travel destinations.  Every person and their business name can be kept up to date as to what people are saying about them on the web so that they are not surprised when they one day google their name.

What to do if you find yourself with a scathing review on a high page ranked website?  You need to blanket the web with video postings, podcasts, press releases, articles, blog postings, forum postings, blog comments and ping everything so that your positive spin unequivocally shows that you are seen as the expert in your field – or at the very least – a decent human being.

Be sure to sign up for your Google Alerts and keep it updated with new terms as you see fit.  If it gets too annoying, you can always receive the information on a weekly basis.  Just make sure that you do it!

Blogging is a great way to get your website noticed in the search engines.  Search engines love blogs because they are usually updated frequently with the latest and greatest information on the web.  However, you can’t just stop at blogging when planning a search engine domination scheme.

Websites such as http://www.socialmarker.com help any website to be disseminated across many different websites.  People are always looking for information in different niches – it may be your niche website that gets picked up by a major blog, or Tweeted or Facebooked.

There are also directory websites such as http://www.brownbook.net and http://www.olx.com .

Success in the search engines means much more than just choosing the right keywords for your domain name.  It involves a concerted effort across many different websites in order to keep your website consistently ranking above your competition in the search engines.

Since I have been updating my site on a fairly regular basis, my Alexa ranking has been continually improving.  You may view your Alexa rank, or the Alexa rank of any website, by visiting alexa.com and downloading the toolbar.

As of today, October 5, 2008, my Alexa rank is 987,581.  Not great, but not too bad.

There are a number of ways of improving your Alexa ranking, or any search engine ranking for that matter.  Google really loves blog posts.  Blog posts that provide good content are highly rewarded in the search engines.

The search engines are always looking to thwart the people who try to scam (or beat) the system to get their website ranked higher.  I was doing some research for this article and there were suggestions from people to post in forums and blogs using the alexa.com link.  There were also other suggestions such as asking all of your friends and relatives to visit your site using their browser with Alexa toolbar.

I have a better suggestion.  Have good solid relevant content on your website.  Be active in forums and blogs and attach your website to your posts.  Get your traffic up through a combination of Google Adwords, relevant advertising in your niche, and blog posting.

At the end of the day, is an Alexa ranking of 20 all that important, or is it qualified traffic that you are looking for?

There are many ways to get free traffic on the web.  FREE means no money out of your pocket.  This post will focus on the social bookmarking ways of getting traffic to your site:

Twitter.com:  Twitter is an easy of getting your feet wet in the social bookmarking arena.  Go to twitter.com, sign up.  Add your website in the “about me” section of your profile.  All you need to do is to is to write short notes about what you are up to.  If this is about your business, we really don’t need to know what you had for breakfast .

Squidoo.com:  It’s a funny name, but google really seems to love Squidoo.  You can set up your own page – something like “Bestrealestatebrevard” and upload pics, vids, links back to your home page, and advertising.  It is very easy to set everything up the way you want it to look, and it is also easy to update.  Squidoo has a great user forum with ideas on how to increase the views of your Squidoo lens.

Hubpages:  Hubpages works a lot like Squidoo – you get your own free webspace to establish a link back to your web site.

These social networking sites allow you to introduce yourself to new markets.  There is more to social networking than Facebook and MySpace.

I received a call the other day from someone who had gotten my name out of the Cocoa Beach Chamber of Commerce directory.  They explained that they were putting together a basketball poster, and were looking for advertisers who would be interested in being on the poster.  

It was fairly inexpensive – $250 and they were promising that I would not be competing with any other company with a business similar to mine.  

I declined the offer.  The money and the lack of competition were indeed compelling – yet I made an educated guess as to where those basketball posters would be displayed.  I believe that most of the posters would be hung in a teenager’s bedroom.  I am interested in business to business advertising, not the teenage market.  If I sold I-phones – sure, put me on the poster.  Since I sell web design and hosting services, I need to be where my customers are.  

Effective targetted traffic is an important part of your advertising budget.  In future posts I will discussing several ways of getting free, as well as paid advertising that will greatly enhance the quality of visitors to your website.