Local listings truly only work if you have an actual business that caters around local retail and services.  It is of course important to have a good landing page and accurate contact information on your local listing otherwise any work put into local marketing will be worthless. But , now lets assume that you already have a listing up and want to start ranking higher.

The first thing you must do if is fill up your profile with lots of content and relevant keywords.

Upload as many pictures as Google allows.
Upload as many videos as Google allows.
Fill the title with keywords you want to rank with.
Fill your description sections with as much content as you can with keywords related to your industry.

Make sure you have all information about your company’s policy, hours of operation, and payments etc etc

Get your site reviewed ! Have customers leave you positive reviews , the more the better. Also if you have not already make sure you visit other local listings sites and fill out a profile and have them reviewed by clients. Sites such as kudzu , yahoo local, yelp all show up on your Google Local listing reviews.

Having reviews is so important in any local marketing campaigns  I have seen a lot of people fill out profiles or buy advertising on superpages, kudzu, etc and not have any reviews. Reviews are why people go to these sites , they want to know if your company is legit. Reviews are pretty much word of mouth and word of mouth is the best traffic  you can get.

Add a coupon , adding a coupon can attract new clients. Google loves this and makes  you stand out.

Try these tips on how to improve your local listing and watch the leads come in. Sometimes it takes a while for the results to appear. I have waited a couple of months for a listing to finally appear at the top. Depending how competitive your local market is for your store or service is will depend on how high you rank.  Getting these steps done will definitely help your business.
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• Tweepular helps you “cleanse” your Twitter account of followers “unworthy” of your attention. Get rid of people who only tweet once in a blue moon and dust up your folowers list.
• TwitterContd lets you break free from the “140 characters or less” barrier that Twitter had imposed on you.
• TwAitter schedules your tweets for later. Comes with an impressive outlook style calender system.
• BigTweet lets you use it as a bookmarklet on your browser to share stuff that iterests you on web. Simply highlight the text that interests you, and BigTweet will automatically capture the page title and shorten the URL for you to post it on Twitter.
• HootSuite.com helps you manage all your twitter accounts at one place. If you have multiple twitter accounts, then I highly recommend this App which will help you get the most out of multiple accounts.
• TweetLater.com helps you auto-follow people that follow you, send automated welcome direct messages, and gives you the option to e-mail yourself tweets with specific keywords that you want to follow.
• TweetOClock.com has a pretty simple and a straight purpose. Use it to find the best time to tweet someone you know.
• Tweetizen lets you create groups for people that matter to you and digest the daily influx of tweets coming on your way to find the tweets that truly matter to you.

Comment and let me know if you have any other suggestions as well.

• 8 Extremely Useful Twitter Web Apps to get the most out of Twitter..!
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• Twittering you way up to internet stardom!
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What can keyword bolding do for me?

Well, search engines have been known to give more importance to HTML tags like <h1>, <h2>, <b> in your content. For an example, if you can wrap up your keywords in <b> tag – that is, if you can bold your keywords in your content, that will play out positively for you in ranking higher for your targeted keywords.

Will I get penalized bolding these keywords?

Doing this (bolding out keywords) excessively and bolding out every instance of that keyword in your content will set off an alarm on search engines since that looks like keyword spamming. This is why Bold SEO makes only the first 3 instances of each of your keywords bold (in a content body), and no more.

And bold SEO does this to all of your pages/posts automatically, only in the actual post content. And this will ensure your keywords are shown off to the search engines, without any penalization from the search engines.

How to install Bold SEO

1. Download the Zip file.
2. Unzip it and upload the folder in it (bold_seo) to your wp-content/plugins/ folder.
3. Make sure the files are present at [Your Wordpress Directory]/wp-content/plugins/bold_seo
4. CHMOD the keywords.txt file that you find in the bold_seo folder to 666. (If you’re using FileZilla, right-click the keywords.txt file, select “File Attributes and key in 666 in the “Numeric Value” field.
5. All done! You can access the Bold SEO settings from Settings>Bold SEO and define your keywords.

Known Issues

• Keywords defined are case-sensitive. Dog food is not as the same as dog Food in Bold SEO. Until I work on a solution in the next version, you will kindly have to input all the variations of the keyword.
• Plugin will not work unless you put the files into the [Your Wordpress Directory]/wp-content/plugins/bold_seo directory. So please make sure you install it correctly.

That’s it! All the best with your SEO!!

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As I say, a non-exhausted method to get some extra hits in this over populated niche is a Gold mine!

SEO discovery of the week

If you were keeping an eye on your SERPs, you might have noticed that this week there were some major changes in them. This blog was ranking at 20-30 for the keyword “Make Money Blogging” and it just fell to 40 overnight.

Curious about this devil dance, I was searching for the odds and ends of this. And it was then I found out that I’m not the only one. In fact, as a new measure, it’s believed in the SEO community that effective from now on, Google will weigh anchor text lesser than how it used to. Why? Everyone buys paid links for their targeted anchor text and no matter how irrelevant the site is, it’s ranking gets a boost. And that was just a major loophole in the Google algorithm.

How to restore your SERPs? Well, make the content relevant to the keywords you’re targeting. Of course, the blackhat approach would be Keyword Stuffing.

AdSense’s weird CSS behavior – busted!

I was doing some SEO consultancy for my friend Eranda over at Antharjalaya, when his AdSense units just gave up. I was modifying his CSS and Theme Files – tweaking them for SEO purposes, when his AdSense units just became unresponsive.

They were being displayed, no problem there. But except for the top ad in the block (he was using 250×250 blocks) the others were not-clickable., as in, when you click them, nothing happens. This was too weird. (To make things more complex, he was floating the AdSense blocks inline with text) It took me around 5 hours of troubleshooting to pin-point the problem. And adding to my misery, I found many people with the same problem when I was searching for an answer – but not the actual answer anywhere.

The problem was in the CSS layering. Sounds too weird? When AdSense ads become unclickable, it is because one of your divs (or something of that sort) is actually hovering over your AdSense unit. (This can be triggered by incorrect XHTML markup, especially incorrect DOCTYPE deceleration) The best thing to do is to put a <div> tag around the AdSense unit and set the z-index to a very high number. Like this:

<div style="z-index:99;">
AdSense Code
</div>

The solution came to me quite intuitively and as of that I’m not surprised that no one had found the solution to this problem before.

Of course, I wouldn’t post my full discovery about AdSense blocks behavior, and my findings here for the greater good. Why? Let’s just say that if I did so here, lots of black hatters would be killing AdSense with macros – earning a lot of ‘cents’ – with fraudulent clicks that look completely natural.

Oh and if you want any SEO consultancy services for your blog, just shoot me a message. Eranda will tell you how awesome I am

Contest Update

3 days elapsed and already an update? Well, making up for a big mistake I did when mentioning one of great sponsors – AuctionSiteWriter – I’d like you guys to know that they are having a really cool deal over there for ROCKFUSE readers.

If you want to buy AuctionSiteWriter, and need a killer discount, guys at 1CoolFile will give $10CAD off their normal prize if you e-mail them with the subject “ROCKFUSE Blog Contest”, and tell that you’re par-taking in the contest. Of course, they will refund your money if you actually win that in the blog contest

If you haven’t joined the contest yet, well, you know what to do?

In the spotlight

Finally, these were some articles discovered on my feed reader and blog-hopping that are totally worthy of a mention!

Don’t Waste Your Adspace On Bidvertiser: Turnip tells us why we all should stay away from Bidvertiser! The claims made in this post seems pretty solid and it had definitely changed my perspective on Bidvertiser. If you’re trying out Bidvertiser on your blog, promoting it or doing anything at all with it, then you should read it before promoting them furthermore!

Tagging 101 – Tags, Clouds and More: Probably the most comprehensive guide to tagging you’ll ever read! Keving shares the basics, social media approach and some cool plugins to help you get more out of your tags!

3 part Yahoo! Buzz experiment: Matt over at Blogging Fingers is doing a through analysis of Yahoo! Buzz. If you’re promoting your blog in Yahoo! Buzz, well, this is a must read for you. Matt talks about a lot of things concerning Yahoo! Buzz. At the time of this post’s submission, it seems like the last part is yet to be published by Matt.

Is It a Big Deal To Be on Yahoo Top Buzz?: Is it? You might want to read Eranda’s post to find out! Most of you will be really surprised by his findings – rest assured!

Grow Your Business with “Konnects”: Thanks to this post, I was able to fid this really cool young-entrepreneurs-only version of LinkedIn. (Well, it has nothing to do with LinkedIn) but certainly seems to be building authority.

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• And the winner is…

If you haven’t already signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, you can do so here.

Finding out where search engines spiders had major crawling problems

An unfriendly URL structure or certain rich media content may be giving the Search Engines spiders a bit of a hard time in indexing your blog. Google explains what they call “unfriendly URL structure”, here.

This can lead to a whole part of your blog not being accessible/indexed by search engines. “Diagnostics>Web Crawl” section can tell you exactly, what’s wrong and where.

Spotting problematic content on the blog

In the “Diagnostic>Content Analysis” section, you can see what exactly I mean by “Problematic Content”. Duplicate meta descriptions, Long meta descriptions, Short meta descriptions, Non-informative title tags and Duplicate title tags are to name a few.

Google Webmaster Tools will tell you exactly where these errors occur, so you can make your blog more search engine friendly.

Thorough analysis of the search queries

Google Analytics (or whatever your stats reporting software might be), can repost you the search queries that bring you the traffic. So can Google Webmaster Tools. And also, it can do something a bit cooler too. It can show you what search queries showed up pages from your blog. With this you can further optimize your pages to get more traffic, since you know that your blog has something that people are searching for.

You can see this in the “Statistics>Top Search Queries” section.

See exactly how Googlebot crawls your blog

Log on to the “Statistics>Crawl Stats” section, you can see how active Googlebot is in your pages. You can see the number of pages crawled per day, number of KBs downloaded and so on. If you’re suspecting that your blog has Search Engine Indexing problems, this section should give you the first clue in starting your troubleshooting.

Check out the link love

If you wanted to know what pages in your blog has the most external links pointing to it, well, “Links>Pages with external links” section can tell you that. This is a great method to analyze and promote your blog’s pillar content, since you have an exact idea of your posts’ external link count as indexed by Google. And what’s cooler? You can check out who’s linking to you too!

Sitemap Status

And finally, it’ll tell you all about your sitemap. If you haven’t already set a sitemap for your blog, read this on specifying sitemaps for your blog. If you’ve, then keep a close eye on Google Webmaster Tools to to check out the status of your sitemap. Having a broken sitemap can really be a negative factor for your Search Engine traffic.

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• Add a 301-redirect and save your blog!

It’s the biggest collection of Wordpress SEO plugins, ever compiled – to date.

Add Meta Tags Wordpress Plugin

What it does: This plugin adds XHTML META tags to your WordPress blog. The addition of the META tags is fully automatic , but it also includes all those features a SEO-concerned publisher would need in order to have total control over those meta tags. You can add META tags to single posts, archive pages, static pages and everything else. Customizability is bit of an issue with these plugins.

Download: http://www.g-loaded.eu/2006/01/05/add-meta-tags-wordpress-plugin/

All in One SEO Pack

Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines and Generates META tags automatically. This is my personal favorite. If you’re too lazy to generate META tags, you can let the plugin do it for you. If not, you can always customize them individually and suit them according to SERPs.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Another Wordpress Meta Plugin

The name says it all. Allows you to do the basic configurations of All in one SEO Pack. If you’re not happy with All in one SEO pack (though I can not think of a good reason for that), you can always use this META tags plugin to give your Wordpress SEO a boost.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/another-wordpress-meta-plugin/

Bad Behavior Wordpress Plugin

Simply put, this one keeps the naughty spam bots out of your Wordpress blog. Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for keeping unwanted blog, wiki, forum, guestbook and referrer spam away from your site. All these bots that are posting your content on splogs will have no entry to your blog. But do keep your eyes open since some users have claimed it also blocks a few useful bots to your site too.

Download: http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Download: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/

Excerpt Editor

This eliminates one of the biggest SEO headaches – Content Duplication. Excerpt Editor provides a convenient place for creating and editing all excerpts. It can also add custom excerpts for pages (not possible without a plugin). Features: auto-creating excerpts when publishing new Posts and Pages, displaying customisable excerpts from the content for posts without an excerpt, appending excerpts from the latest posts to each Post or from the sub-pages to each Page, replacing the content for all archive and tags pages with excerpts.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/excerpt-editor/

FeedSmith Plugin for Feedburner

What can I say? The effect might be minimal. But if you’re using FeedBurner, it’s a classic!

Download: http://orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/

Category magic Wordpress Plugin

Categories are very helpful if you’re into Advanced SEO techniques such as siloing. Don’t ask me what that is – it’s best that you don’t know – Just kidding Category Magic allows you to do many magical things with categories. For example, it can display links to posts from a single category and even a random category. There are several plugins that can do that. Category Magic does more.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-magic/

Google Positioner

This is one of the coolest and most underrated Wordpress SEO plugins ever! After putting the right keywords in the right page, it is imperative to keep track of your keyword performance. With this handy-dandy plugin it is now possible to track your website for your keywords in Google. You can track through multiple regions and keep an eye on the competitors also…

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-google-seo-positioner/

Google Sitemap Generator Wordpress Plugin

I’ve mentioned this plugin countless times in my posts. This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. It’s an absolute must have if you’re running a Wordpress blog – and if you’re serious about your SEO traffic. Refer to this article if you don’t know anything about making it work.

Download: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

HeadMeta Plugin

Yet another Meta Plugin for you. HeadMeta creates <meta> “description” or “keywords” tags for individual posts or pages. It can also create arbitrary <meta> or <link> tags. These are easily set on a per-post (or page) basis by simply adding Custom Fields.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headmeta/

Karailiev’s sitemap

For some reason, if you’re not too happy with the Google Sitemap Generator, this will most definitely help. This plugin adds a XML sitemap to your blog. It’s used to show all your pages and posts to the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Doesn’t have as much configuration facilities as Google Sitemap Generator, but a worthwhile alternative.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/karailievs-sitemap/

KB Robots.txt Wordpress Plugin

When robots (like the Googlebot) crawl your site, they begin by requesting http://example.com/robots.txt and checking it for special instructions. Use this plugin to create and edit your robots.txt file from within Wordpress (using Options -> Robots.txt). It’s a simple plugin that let’s you edit Robots.txt within your Wordpress blog.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kb-robotstxt/

Nofollow Links in Posts

Nofollow Links in Posts plugin enables you to add the “nofollow” attribute into links in a post within a specified category. This plugin is useful if you are doing sponsored posts. You can set the plugin to add the “nofollow” attribute for posts older than “X” days.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-links-in-posts/

Objection Redirection Wordpress Plugin

Redirects posts from what you don’t want to want you want. Also helpful if you’re trying to eradicate duplicated content in your blog. But the setting are a wee bit hard to grasp at first. Give it a couple of minutes’ concentrated attention and you’d do just fine.

Download: http://www.biggnuts.com/objection-redirection-wordpress-plugin/

Optimal Title

Rectifies one of the biggest SEO drawbacks of the default Wordpress settings. Optimal Title is a WordPress plugin that mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first. Which means. Title of your post, will appear before the blog’s name.

Download: http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/

Permalink Redirect

A WordPress plugin that replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry. Another great way to save your PR from duplicated content.

Download: http://fucoder.com/code/permalink-redirect/

Permalink Validator Wordpress Plugin

Of all the Permalink Redirection plugins to save your from Search bots mistakenly assuming that your blog has duplicated content, this is the best. Does a lot of SEO modifications to your Wordpress blog, automatically, which would take several minutes and very high risk .htaccess edits – including, adding trailing back-slash if missing, adding or removing www prefix according to your permalink structure and forcing a correct 404 page instead of showing an empty search result when using an invalid URL.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalink-validator/

Platinum SEO Pack

Yet another alternative to the legendary All in one SEO which actually lives up to the term ‘alternative’. Has many of the All in one SEO features and more. Optimizing Post and Page Titles for search engines, Overriding any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page, adding index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post/page – are just a few.

Download: http://techblissonline.com/platinum-seo-pack/

Really Simple Sitemap Wordpress Plugin

Does what the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator does – which is building a simple HTML sitemap for your blog. But, it’s not so customizable as I would like it to be.

Download: http://www.internetwealthmaster.com/wordpress-really-simple-sitemap/

Redirection plugin for Wordpress

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Download: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

Robots Meta Plugin

You don’t really need this if you’ve go the Platinum SEO Pack. But, if you’re using All in one SEO, this might come in handy because it makes the All in one SEO plugin complete with the Robots Meta tags – which by the way helps robots when they are indexing your Wordpress blog.

Download: http://yoast.com/wordpress/robots-meta/

SEO Friendly Images Wordpress Plugin

SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well. ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match. TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

Download: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-friendly-images

SEO Post Link

The SEO Post Link makes your post link short and SEO friendly. It removes common words that are unnecessary for search engine optimization of your blog post link. It doesn’t shorten your slug in a random manner. It only deletes the words which are not important in terms of SEO.

Download: http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/spl/

SEO Slugs Wordpress Plugin

The SEO Slugs Wordpress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. Another alternate to the SEO Post Link Plugin.

Download: http://www.vretoolbar.com/news/seo-slugs-wordpress-plugin

SEO Title Tag

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (“SEO“). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility. SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website.

Download: http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

Subdomains by Category

This Wordpress plugin turns all your categories into subdomains. It works on your post permalinks too. Only use this if your host supports it and only use this IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING. The advantage of having subdomains is that Search Engines tend to give subdomains more value than permalinks.

Download: http://wordpress-plugins.biggnuts.com/wordpress-subdomains-plugin/

WordPress Tweaks

WordPress Tweaks is a powerful yet simple plugin to help you push the boundaries of WordPress by fine-tuning its many aspects. This multi-purpose plugin specializes in simple toggle-on/off changes. It adds many useful settings pertaining to comments, posts, SEO, security, the administration back-end, and much more. Some tweaks can even replace plugins that you may already have installed.

Download: http://wordpress.jdwebdev.com/plugins/tweaks/

WP Page Numbers Wordpress Plugin

With page numbers instead of next and previous links users can easily navigate much quicker to the page they want. It is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well, because it creates a tighter inner link structure.

Download: http://www.jenst.se/2008/03/29/wp-page-numbers

WP_LinkTools Wordpress Plugin

Publicize your posts and pages by adding the to the social bookmarking site Delicious, automatically as soon as you post them. It’s one of my personal favorites and a quick Del.icio.us link building super weapon. Highly recommended!

Download: http://www.dcoda.co.uk/index.php/tag/wp_linktools/

All of these plugins have the potential to boost your Search Engine Rankings with a little bit of analysis. However, as any SEO would tell you, don’t just install the plugin and wait for the magic to happen. If you’re trying to get on top of something and maintain it, you have to experiment and evolve.

I sincerely hope you’ll find these SEO Tweaking, Link Building, META Optimizing, Bot Controlling plugins useful – which by the way took me more than 5 hours to check, analyze and experiment

Technorati Tags: seo tools,website seo,blog and seo,blog for seo,seo friendly blog,seo,all in one seo,wordpress,plugins,meta tag,robots,search engines,serp,content,slugs,titles,keywords,optimize,search engine optimization,sitemaps,google,excerpts,dupliacte,penalize,yahoo

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