Monday 19 December 2016

5 Simple Yet Highly Effective SEO Tips for Local Businesses

Doing SEO is never a complicated affair; in fact, just the basic optimization techniques can transform your business’ online position and influence. SEO is a tool that can put a local business on an international platform while still giving in a huge local presence. Here are some five SEO tips that you can use for your local business online.


Have a Solid Web Presence 


Your business might be the best in the industry with top-notch products or services, but all that is offline. Things are very different, online. Your business will only be as relevant as its online presence. Therefore, ensure that you have a solid authority on the web. It is not just about good SEO, and you need to have a site that is accessible and easy to navigate across different platforms. Bear in mind that having a mobile-friendly website and using mobile-friendly SEO tactics has gained a great push from Google, so think in those lines and you will give your business a solid online presence. Use responsive web design tester tool to check if your site is mobile friendly or not.

Put Your Customer First 


The ultimate goal of doing any SEO is to get your target audience to see your business. It pays to avoid over obsessing on your optimization efforts forgetting that your customer always comes first. You should use good content but not just for the search engines, for your target audience as well. Think of your clients when generating content for your website making sure the information is relevant and current based on current trends and customer expectation.

Connect with Your Customers 


So you have to know how to connect with your clients, which is the objective of doing search engine optimization. All the elements – good content, use of Meta tags, link building, and all the other optimization tools and techniques – should get you close to your target audience. Doing a bit of online marketing will help, and part of these efforts will include things such as email marketing coupled with your efforts to take advantage of Google+ and Google Hangouts. Leveraging social media will also be a very effective measure. Engage your customers on social networks holding various conversations that do not necessarily have to be related to your business. Connect, share, and build a relationship that is not just business oriented.

Keep Things Local 


The internet is a vast global marketplace. Though your search engine optimization efforts for your local business will place it on the global map, your efforts should start focused on reaching the local market. For instance, if you optimize your website, concentrate on creating locally-specific pages. Make use of Google local listing to ensure that your business can be found online via searches on the local directories. Think of it this way, if your business is in California, it makes business sense to want people in California to find your business easily more than other people elsewhere in the world. Therefore, you need to drill down your SEO efforts to a target location or place.

Seek Reviews 


As you seek reviews, always remember that the customer is king, the customer is always right. You need to have a positive outlook on all reviews, the good and the bad. Reviews give you an open idea of what your target market things about your business. You can use this information to make the necessary changes that will not only better your products or services both offline and online.

Friday 20 May 2016

Top 5 Best Alternatives of Google Search Engine

Search Engines are almost the most important part of our life. For every information you want to search for on the internet, all you have to do is to put your query in the search engine box and leave the rest it. Next moment, millions of results would pop up on the screen. Google, undoubtedly, leads the way as the best search engine present out there with a majority of people preferring it over others. Besides, there are quite a lot more different web search engines and ZenSeoTools which are probably good enough for our daily use. Some of them are listed below.

Bing


The Microsoft backed web search engine was introduced to us in 2009 by Steve Balmer, Microsoft CEO. It succeeded Microsoft’s previous search engines such as MSN Search, Live Search and Windows Live Search. The search engine is able to prosecute your queries in a variety of different services such as text, audio, video, images and map results. Bing is easily the second largest search engine prevalent in US, according to a survey in November 2015, with just 20% query volume. Google leads the chart with 64%.

Yahoo 


The Yahoo Search Engine is powered by Yahoo inc. and was launched in the year 1995. However, Yahoo was originally known for being an interface. It used to send queries generated using different search engines to us from their interface. The search engine was backed up by Inktomi in 2001 whilst Google helped it out till the year 2004. Later on, in 2009, Yahoo and Microsoft signed a deal between them for Bing interface to crop up whilst searching on Yahoo. As of now, Bing is the third most used search engine in US with 13% query requests.

Baidu


Baidu is the most used search engine from China. It was initially founded and launched on January 1, 2000. The Chinese backed search engine is ranked 4th in the overall Alexa Internet rankings. Baidu is able to provide its user with 58 different services including search options for images, text, web articles, audio, videos, maps and a unique Chinese dictionary. Besides, Baidu is the first in China to offer WAP and PDA based mobile services.

AOL 


Despite a market share of a paltry 0.59%, AOL is still one of the top most used web search engines available to us. AOL.com started out as Control Video Corporation back in the year 1983. Later, it was renamed and rebranded as America Online in the year 1991 before finally switching to AOL Inc in 2009. Verizon Communications have recently bought the search engine for a whopping $4.4 billion.

Ask.com 


The only web search engine which is in the format of a questionnaire is Ask.com. Earlier it was known as Ask Jeeves when it was founded in the year 1995. Ask.com involves a web based community where people would be responding to your queries and questions. If there are no answers to your questions, then the search engine will take help of many other third party applications to provide you with relevant results.

Conclusion


Google leads the web based search engine by a long way but many other new and old search engines are slowly closing the gap up top with Bing and Yahoo being the largest contributors to the cause. The list is created keeping things in mind such as the speed and accuracy of the results the search engine provides besides its market share and number of people who use them.