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And why it is so Important to Businesses in Blackpool!! There is a lot of competition out there don’t you know!!

This Video will give you all the right reasons why you should be on google local business centre..

So How do you go about doing it?

What Google Local Business Centre is and how it works:

Google Local Business Centre was created to help make local search results more relevant and enable businesses to create free Google business directory listings. The advantage of this is that your business listing will appear when a user searches for a type of business followed by the location where they are searching.

The sites that are listed in the Local Business Centre could appear at the top of search results next to a map so if your name isn’t down it won’t be listed. This depends on the search query and the listing that Google has. These business listings are becoming more important, as they are being displayed more often in searches, with up to ten listings before the organic results start. These listings are embedded into Google search, maps and Google earth, so when a user searches for businesses in your area, your listing appears with your address and your location on the map. The following information can be included in your account:

• Your Business Address
• Business/Shop Hours
• Methods of payments accepted
• A link to your website (s)
• Photos & videos of your business

When your business is added to the Google Local Business Directory (once it has been validated by Google, by phone, text message or postcard), customers with a Google account can then write reviews about your company. This provides your listing with a rating from 1 to 5 stars. Having a good rating enables users to search for businesses within a particular area with a certain rating.

How to sign up:

To sign up to Google Local Business Centre you will need to do the following:

• Create a Google account if you have not already done so, (its free) by clicking on the following link: https://www.google.com/local/add/ and following the steps. Your Google account login can be used across many products
• Go to Google Local Business Centre and login to your account and enter the details of your business (Address, business hours, methods of payments accepted, link to your website, photos and videos etc).
• Google locates you on the map from your address information.
• Google contacts you either, via phone, text message or postcard, and activates your business listing.
• Google maps can also be added to your site, for instance on your Contacts Page or How to find us Page.

The above information gets you listed on Google Local Business Centre, but in order to improve your listings position on Google searches, we highly recommend that you take advantage of the following advice:

How to get a higher position in Google for localised searching?

Researching the Internet and reviewing forums on the subject, I have found that in order to influence your position with Google Local Business Centre for search results, you will need to do the following:

• Encourage customers to write more reviews. Remember, those writing reviews will need a Google Account to do so, or access to a website which encourages reviews that has an account with Google.
• Where possible, add more photos to your account and if possible videos, (all help to increase the companies visibility and ranking).
• In your account with Google Local Business Centre, ensure where possible to include location Keywords for Blackpool this could of course be proximity to the Tower or indeed Blackpool Pleasure Beach. These are the keywords which are shown on your Local Business advert
• Also the Location Keywords should be included in your Local Business Listing Description, i.e. ‘the full postal address’ this is the Description which is shown on your Local Business advert.

Once Google has verfied you actually own the listing and they can do this almost immediatley by sending you a pin number by telephone or text message which you enter into a confirmation page your listing will go live in a few hours.

This is free advertsing and google business listings always appear before the generic results in the Search Engine Results Page. It would be foolish not to take advantage of it.

No Follow Tags are Read By Google Spiders

So what are No Follow Tags well the wiki reference is thus:

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Lots of big words in there that a lay person who perhaps does not have much experience writing web sites will have a lot of problems with for example HTML Hyper Text Markup Language nothing complicated about it it simple refers to the way text and other code which is simply gobbledygook text is laid out on a web page and read by a browser. The web browser is able to interpret the commands and display the page accordingly for example the picture to the right here will have a <span> </span> attribute added to it to allow it to be displayed to the right of the text. You dont get to see the tags as they are hidden in the page, the fact the are surrounded by < > tells the browser not to display them and to interpret the command inside the tag.

The main think in the wiki explanation we are going to concentrate on today is ‘link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index’ What exactly does that mean.

Well if you were minded to make a comment to this post below you would have the opportunity to add your own web site within the comments section. Now that could be a blog or a commercial site or even your favourite such as BBC news or other if you were so to choose. When the goggle spiders then crawl over this page they will see that link and count it as a vote towards that particular site, the more votes accrued then the further up the Search Engine Rankings Pages that site will appear for its chosen keywords. This particular blog has disabled the no follow tag which therefore allow the votes to be counted for those sites displayed in making a comment.

That is probably the easiest way for me to be able to describe it in non SEO terms. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which basically means creating and working your web pages to such an extent that you give them the best possible chance to appear high in the rankings for a particular term.

Clearly our business here is in the accommodation sector in Blackpool and this blog appears within the domain name of our establishments web space (you can see that by looking at the Url bar. It should come as no suprise that the following text after the / is one of the keyword phrases that we target for our own web site. Although here it is displayed as bedandbreakfastblackpool this is not ideal as clearly this does not make much sense but the most lucrative terms (and these are the most searched terms in the industry sector outside of the word hotel) would be bed and breakfast blackpool or a combination of those words and b&b blackpool or a combination again . It is always the most lucrative terms that get snapped up first by those looking to purchase domain names. That means whomever owns www.bed-and-breakfast-blackpool or www.bedandbreakfastblackpool are going to feature quite highly in searches for people looking for accommodation in Blackpool.

Try it yourself. Open up a google page and enter Bed and Breakfast Blackpool this blog is not optimized for the term so will not appear on probably the first 3 or 4 pages, but if you were to use a long tailed keyword phrase such as Bed and Breakfast Blackpool SEO No Follow Tags then I am pretty sure this article is going to be in the first 10 results. Now if there were 20 blogs written around Blackpool with all those terms within them then google has a dilemma! How does it choose which one to put at the top and which one to put at the bottom. Clearly commercial advantage lies with the page that gets itself to the top of the list.

Google uses an alogirithm to work out the placements the formula for such is a very closely guarded secret. But some things are known about it. One of the marks it gives is the number of inbound links a site has. So if for example you were to comment on this article and include your page url within the comments box then it would give you one google vote. Taking that on into its simplest terms if you then tagetted some phase such as blue widgets in Blackpool and were one of two sites that competed on that term google would put your site above the other on inbound links.

So next time you are minded to comment or not on that blog post and whether you should enter your url then you should know you will get a little benefit from it.

In summary Sites that follow the do follow principle (such as this one) will allod google to follow all the links on the page. That means the follow will not only be counted as a vote but will also benefit from additional useful kudos if the subject material on the linked site is in common. Page rank of the site also comes into play here but that subject is for another day.

Sites that have the no follow attribute enabled will not allow google to follow the links but these will still be counted as a vote for that partucular site.

One downside is the amount of spam that can be picked up by persons trying to gain advantage by posting numerous links in the hope of accelerating their site(s) up the SERPS. Although it is a simple enough job to moderate these out.

Very clearly for any undertaking, advertising must be a key consideration in driving business. This is particularly true given the absolute need to reach your target market and the potential for large amounts of money to be lost if the wrong decisions are made.

Very clearly the 21st Century is very different from the last. Talking in the sense of an accommodation provider in Blackpool we consider internet advertising as absolutely vital. There are still of course other very viable avenues that should not be overlooked such as press advertising and listings in yellow pages and with firms like touch local and of course listings with directory advertisers of which Blackpool has a few probably none more important than Stay Blackpool. These other more traditional means of getting your message out but they should always be accompanied by a website.

Anyway the purpose of this article today is to provide some background information that can be gleaned for a good tracking script.

A free version can be found here at Extreme Tracking. You simply sign up for your account and it will give you a section of code that needs to be inserted before the </body> tag on the particular page it is tracking at the same time all that needs to be done it a slight alteration to the code in two places to reflect the content on that particular page (such as home page or blog page or other) and so you can identify which one is being tracked if you use more than one script. It sounds complicated but it is not and it shouldn’t faze people. Provided you have sufficient computer skills to be able to write a letter in Microsoft word and can get access to your web space to edit the pages then the ability to do this can be learned in 15 minutes and in any event there are plenty of good tutorials around on the web.

The data is returned to you in almost real time and not only lists the number visitors you get to your site but the date and time they accessed, their IP address and internet provider, the type of browser they used (user agent), operating system on their computer and crucially the most important aspect from a business point of view the search engine used and the keywords entered that brought the visitor to your site. This is the sort of information that some multinational companies will pay top dollar for as it means internet advertising which is always based around what are called keywords or keyword phrases can be honed and diverted into areas which provide the best returns.

I have provided some screenshots alongside this article that show the sort of data that can be returned and how valuable that can be. I do actually subscribe to the paid up service at Extreme Tracking as it gives us additional features and data we are able to use. This costs us 15 Euro’s a Quarter year and is worth every penny.

Extreme Tracking

If anyone has any further question on how it all works they are most welcome to get in touch with me by email.

If Extreme does not fire anyone’s rockets then they are by no means the only tracking provider out there always remember google is your friend, because remember if you can master this and harvest the data returned then google will be sending customers your way.

An Individual Hit the Data Recieved

Map of Northern England

Mapped Links from Across the World

To WordPress to be more precise.

A number of reasons we have done this but fear not there is absolutely nothing wrong with blogger and this particular platform. Anyway the new address is below as we hope you will save it and join us in our new home.

Our Blog’s New Home is here….. Register as a user here

Wordpress Logo

A lot to be said for blogger and the fact it is owned by google means the posts upon it get indexed very quickly. Indexed means read by the web bots (short for robots or another term used is spiders) which are automated progams (who liked the Matrix movie) which crawl the web indexing it’s content.

That way when someone searches for aunt sally’s brilliant bisquit recipe provided there is a web page with those terms upon it then it will feature high in the rankings. It need not actually have the recipe simply those words as google and the others are not that clever to figure out the content exactly.

The trick is where there are 2000 odd pages listing aunt sallys bisquit recipe then google and the others have to try and figure out which one will return exactly what the searcher is looking for.

Then comes into play a a whole new ball game the contender pages are ranked against each other with the relevancy and number of inbound links counted to establish which page is more important than the others.

Anyway WordPress is a blogging tool for the little more advanced and has a lot more bells and whistles that allow the content to be SEO’d.

Search Engine Optimization is what that stands for and it sounds awfully technical doesn’t it well I will post about that again in the future amongst the more topical stuff going on in South Shore and try and break it down into easly understandable chunks.

Anyway I am off over there now to write about the busy Bank Holiday Weekend we had..

If anyone has any problems they are most welcome to email me. pararct@gmail.com