Your customers are more and more often searching for businesses like yours on the Internet. Studies show that these customers have a serious buying intent. As a local business (online or off) you need to figure out how to cost effectively reach out to these Local customers and start the business relationship before your competition does.

Why should local search marketing be important to your business? The Kelsey research group found:

74% of households use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally.

Approximately 45% of local searches had a buying intent.

The percentage of respondents who used yellow page directories decreased from 75% to 62%. (If you have a yellow page ad, it is time to consider buying a smaller ad and shifting your marketing dollars to the Internet.)

As local business owners you need to take action now. You need to keep your existing customers, and gain new customers, so you need to be found where they are searching. Local Search Marketing is where your future clients and customers will come from.

So where do you start?

Most likely your customers will have a default setting on their computers and this will be set to one of these sites for search; Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL. These search engines all index web pages and have some form of paid advertising referred to as Pay Per Click. This is fine if you have a website but what about many small and local businesses that have little or no web presence at all? And even if you do have a website, does it show up in the search engines above?

Okay, so what other choices have you got?

There are those folks, you know whom I am talking about, who will place you not only in a hard copy directory but also have services online. The challenge is in what the financial cost is, BIG, but hey, they have been around a long time and have deep pockets. The other issue is that they often advertise in the search engines and you will find them there BUT if you follow the link to them, you need to do your search all over again! What a pain.

There are other commercial “local search engines” and some of these are good value but many are not comprehensive. If there are only a few thousand businesses in a local directory most users will leave given the limited amount of content.

So what you need to do is use a search engine like Google and search for “local search directory”, make sure you limit your search to the country youre in. The results include Yahoo local search and a number of local directories. You should check these out and see what it takes to participate in the directories that make the first page of the Google search. By doing so, youll be able to get a feel for how they work and what is needed for you to get listed competitively

When marketing on the Internet, the sooner your ad is displayed to your prospect, the greater your chance of making a sale. This is the reason why search engine traffic performs so well. Most surfers initiate their Internet activity at a search engine. Indeed, many have a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN set as their home page. In other words, it is the first thing they see when they log onto the Internet.

Lets take a closer look at the chain of events. A surfer logs onto the Internet because she wants to find something. She goes to Google and enters her search and among the results she sees your ad. It catches her attention and she clicks through to your site. Since you are offering exactly what she is looking for, she is turned into a customer and you make a sale. This scenario happened the way it did because we understand the virtues of targeted traffic, but it also happened because we were the first to satisfy the surfers needs.

Now, say the surfer has been online for some time and has been surfing from one site to another, looking around and possibly doing research. This surfer may be frustrated because she has not found what she wants, and is therefore in a negative mindset. What is more likely, however, is that this surfer has turned into a window shopper. Either way, since this surfer has been online for some time now, the result is she will be harder to convert into a sale.

When your site is shown on content sites it is being displayed to surfers who have often been online for a longer period of time and are generally not as receptive to your message. Add to this the fact that your ad will not be as targeted and your chances of converting the surfer are even less.

What we want is highly targeted traffic and we want that traffic to be receptive to our message. As that traffic becomes more and more diluted, its value diminishes as well.

One strategy that can be used with content targeting is to create a separate campaign for it. In this campaign all bids would be as low as possible, i.e. 5 cents. In this way you can display your ad on content sites, but the cost would be more in line with the traffics value. Keep in mind also that there is greater chance of click fraud when advertising on content sites, which is another good reason to keep bids as low as possible.

Google recently added a feature where you can bid separately on your content network ads, which allows you to bid lower on your content network ads without having to setup another campaign. This is useful and can be a good solution. I still prefer to create a separate campaign for content network advertising, however. A separate campaign allows for greater organization and analysis. This choice is one of personal preference, though, and you should use whichever option you feel more comfortable with.

In the end, you should be skeptical about content targeting, as the traffic quality will not be the same as the pure search engine traffic. If you really want the extra traffic, then make sure you bid separately for your content site campaign, keeping your bids as low as possible. You should also keep a close eye on your stats to make sure you are not paying for any fraudulent clicks. Good luck.

Yes, I am surprised. My previous statistics were evidently a bit outdated as I had the search engine war between the Big 3 Providers — Google, Yahoo, and MSN — running a tight 1-2-3. Indeed, it must have been early in 2005 the last time I bothered to look at the statistics, but at that time my stats showed that Google controlled 36% while Yahoo and MSN were running at 33% and 32% respectively. Yes, the statistics total to more than 100% since they include those people who use more than one search engine [in this case they are counted twice].

According to the Neilsen//NetRatings and as republished in the October 20, 2005, issue of USAToday, Googles share is as follows:

Google is the Internet’s most-used search engine, with a 45.1% share of searches in September, according to market tracker Nielsen/NetRatings. Yahoo (YHOO) had 23.3% and MSN 11.7%, says Nielsen.

To put it bluntly, only Yahoo is in the game and MSN is quickly fading to irrelevancy. How can I say this? Because when I do searches of key words that I frequently check up on including, Corporate Flight Attendant Community, I find some vastly different results.

With MSN, the search results yielded 3117 results, with Yahoo 326, and with Google 9850. What is apparent to me is that Google is doing the best job of indexing pages while the other two are way behind. I will give MSN credit for the recent leap in the number of results for Corporate Flight Attendant Community, but several of the results were for pages I deleted months, even years ago! Overall, I believe Yahoo harnesses their popular Yahoo Groups, Hotjobs, and other key features to give them a search engine edge over MSN.

I am betting my money on Google. While it isnt good for one search engine to dominate, when it comes to building my business I want to go with a winner. Clearly, Google has a leg up on the competition, so every page that I create is optimized for my buddy Googlebot to index!

Do you, Yahoo? I don’t… now you understand why.

Almost everyone knows that when a person wants to know something on the Internet they turn to search engines like MSN, and Google to find what they are looking for. This makes it very important for web site owners to know how to get their web sites ranked well on search engines, so that the people doing the searching can find their web site.

The first thing you should know is that the job of a search engine is to bring up the web page, that is most relevant to the search.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t rocket science!

The job of the web site owner is to make their web site more relevant than other sites. The other job they need to do is make sure the web site gets submitted to search engines. Do those two things and you are getting some attention well needed from the search engines, the reward is free targeted traffic.

I wrote an my first article titled “The plug-in Profit Home Business Review.” Now I didn’t know too much about writing articles at the time so this happened to be dumb luck. After a few weeks I did a search to find that my article got placed on the first pages of MSN, GOOGLE and Yahoo, when I searched for “plug-in profit site”( E-Commerce business). Surprised to see that the article was ranked higher than hundreds of thousands of possible sites, I looked into the reason for my article’s great success.

When you read the article you’ll see that the article is extremely related to the plug-in profit home business site. The title after all was called “The Plug-in Profit Home Business Review.” The content is all about the program and mentions the name of the program several times. To sum things up this is what made my article step in front of my competitors.

I soon applied my new found knowledge into my own web site. I built my web site around the keyword, “plug-in Profit site. I made the title of my home page “plug-in profit home business site” Now days you will see somewhere on the first pages of the search engines internet5kincome.com when a search for “plug-in profit” is done. You may even find my first article hanging around. This proves that content is still king when it comes to search engines! I will also add the title helps out a great deal too!

In my efforts I made a mistake on my web page, I created a link titled :”Can taking on-line serveys really make you money? Click here to find out”.

Notice the misspelled word serveys. While the rest of the world spells surveys with a “U”. I spelled this one word with an “E”.

I am embarrassed to say it, but that mistake placed my site on page 1 when a person searched for “on-line serveys” this winning mistake brought a surprising number of free traffic.

I am amazed at how many people spell surveys with an “E”! (The mistake has been corrected, but it is something you should know!)

When experimenting with search engine optimization, or Bristol SEO for short. Track your web site’s performance with a tracking service. I use opentracker.net for my web site’s tracking. This service will show you where all your visitors come from.

If a visitor was referred by a search engine, obviously the visitor did a search. The tracker will tell you what keyword the visitor searched for. That keyword is something you should know, so that you can build on it, to bring in even more traffic. You may be surprised at what you find out from the web site tracker. I was surprised that so many people spelled surveys wrong, but I would have never found out if it wasn’t for the web site tracker.

Experimenting with Bristol SEO is well worth the time. Set your sites on what people are searching for, and build your web site around those keywords, and you might find your web site on the first page.

Understand that not all search engines will rank your web site the same, try different search engines to see where your site shows up. MSN.com is one of my favorite engines to use because this site indexes web pages more often than others. This will help you to see if your experiments work a little faster that using the other top named search engines.

I hope to see your web site on the first page of the search engines real soon.

What led, at the time, to what many would have said were very rash moves? After all, reciprocal linking was still being expounded, by all and sundry, as an essential way to get a good ranking, and the software tools were being actively marketed still. Search engine positioning software was still being heavily marketed and is still today; keyword density was a buzz term being branded around as if it were an essential science to be practised by all good Bristol SEO conscious webmasters.

What I did was to go back to marketing basics. I had received my marketing training back in the 1980′s and had practical marketing experience with my own business from the mid 1990′s. I was not born into internet marketing alone, so could still see outside the blinkers and the hype.

A very basic but important aspect of marketing is to know your market place. When it comes to search engine rankings, then clearly a major part of that market was the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, with Google being the clear leader then, and a year later today.

I started to think 18 months ago that as far as reciprocal linking went, it was becoming a spammers’ zone. Surely, I argued with myself, Google did not really want to rank a web site highly just because the web master had the tools and the time to chase around getting reciprocal links? It just did not make sense. And the same was true of buying links. Why should a web site rank highly because they have splashed out on buying links?

What Google, and the others, really wanted was to rank the best web sites for a particular search term, and it seemed only a matter of time before they sniffed out and extinguished the abuses such as blatantly artificial link building, Blog spam, scraping and extreme Bristol SEO’ing.

A year ago, I started two new web sites without any real thought of Bristol SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try to provide what search engines wanted: original content on what people were searching for. While I did provide title and description tags, everything else was just written on a go with the flow basis. The keyword phrase for any page would come out in the natural flow. I could just write to my heart’s content without using any tools checking keyword density.

The first of those new web sites 13 months ago was in the self improvement niche, which is highly competitive. I was expecting to be Sandboxed by Google because of that, and so it proved. But I just kept plugging away, sticking to my no-Bristol SEO principle. Of course, none of us outside Google knows for sure if there is such a thing as a sandbox, but there is undoubtedly a waiting time before a new site is thrown fully into the ranking melting pot.

In the self improvement case, the last Google update saw my site emerge from the sandbox after about 12 months. So, at last, I was able see whether my no Bristol SEO approach was to yield any positive results. Thankfully, a few high rankings were immediately apparent, including a few #1 positions. On one of those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to the #1 position, while the site was #2 (now 1) at MSN.

Now, this is early days for that particular site, and there is much to do to get more high rankings. However, I am confident that Bristol SEO is infinitely more simple than some experts, especially those selling ranking tools, tend to have you believe.

Since I started that particular site, I have only made one major change, and that is convert all my web sites to CSS. Providing a content rich site that is easy to crawl for search engine robots is the most important aspect of the new, simplified Bristol SEO. In fact, following Google’s advice to webmasters is about all you need to do, and that is free.

Of course, those with software products to peddle will argue that I could do even better with their software. But if Google decides to blacklist that software as a manipulating tool, then all my hard work could be undone. So I will leave the others to chase shadows with ranking software, and just enjoy writing content. After all, that is what basic marketing told me to do.