Louisville Kentucky SEO Consultant

Have you noticed not all of you pages show up in Google? Have you used a tool like Aaron Walls SEO for FireFox and found your pages are indeed in the supplemental index? Don’t know what a supplemental result is?

The best way to get your results out of the supplemental index is to make sure:

• Make sure your supplemental result pages are not duplicates of other pages you may have. Include unique meta descriptions, titles, keywords, and copy in the page.
• If the page has to be a duplicate ( because of site architecture, like in a blog ) then make sure to make the duplicate not indexable by Google. Include a “no index” meta tag or exclusion in your robots.txt file.
• Use internal linking to the supplemental result to help define importance to the page and bring it out of the supplemental index.
• Use external linking to the supplemental page for the same reason above.

These have been the best methods I have used to pull pages out of the supplemental index and into the main index for clients to date.

One tip I would like to to share is the use of your meta tag element link. If you have several pages that you consider “important”, then you should include them in your meta section of your pages like this:

link rel='archives' title='title of page linking to' href='http://www.domain.com/page.html'

Be sure to open and close the link element with < and >.

Include these important pages in your HTML sitemap file, XML sitemap file, site navigation ( if appropriate ), and within the body of your content. You may also list these important pages in 404 pages ( pages not found ) and in search results ( if your web site has a site wide search ).

You can also link to these pages from other pages as a ‘related’ entry in your body message for those pages that are closely related to the topic in which you are writing about.

Using linking in this way will help ensure that search engine find and index your important pages within your site.

As a first post to my new blog, I would like to share with you a tactic that works for many clients of mine in helping them gain more expose online. This tactic doesn’t work well for everyone, but if you operate a bricks and mortar business it is something that should not be over looked.

The tactic? Local search marketing!

The search engines are slowly putting more and more emphasis on bringing relevant local results to users when they search for products and services based on their search query ( city or state + term ) and IP location when they made the query. The big 3 ( Google, Yahoo, and MSN ) have already been doing this for some time and with the advent of Google making personalization a permanent feature when using their search engine, you will find more and more users of Google getting exposed to localized results automatically as most users will have already done a few local search queries that will be stored in their personal search history.

With more and more exposure to map services and mobile phone services provided by the big 3 ( think Google 411 and Maps along with MSN and Yahoo Maps ), getting your online presence into local search results just makes sense. Not only will these results show up in the Local versions of the search engines, but in their main index listings too.

Web surfers are even turning to specialized local search providers like online yellow pages, TrueLocal, JudysBook, and more for their local search results. Many services like Yahoo Local allow surfers to rank and review services from companies to help better filter business listings and services.

Currently, I submit my clients to over 60+ local submission services to ensure they get indexed for the proper localities and terms they are seeking. The big 3 get most of their information from 3rd party services as well as their own submissions for local search inclusion. Don’t stop at just submitting your local data to Google in Google Local, go the extra mile and submit it to other local services as Google, Yahoo, and MSN all verify and use 3rd party information to verify their results. The more times they find your information for “Louisville Search Engine Marketing” on other sites, the more likely they are to rank you higher for those queries when someone types that in.

Ranking for a local term might not bring in a ton of traffic compared to the same generic ( non localized ) term, but you will be finding better quality, targeted visitors looking for your products and services.

Think about it.. if you were a web surfer looking for a dentist to perform a cleaning on your teeth, wouldn’t you search for a local dentist ( example “Louisville Family Dentist” ) rather than searching for just “Family Dentist” in Google? The traffic might be a lot lower, but then again you are getting better quality leads that will actually convert for you in the end, raising your conversion rate in the process.

You can extend this idea to pay per click marketing ( Adwords and Overture ) and other areas as well. Never stop thinking about how to use this tactic to your advantage. The market for local terms is smaller and less competitive compared to general terms, but that loop is closing faster and faster every day as the larger competitors are catching on and hogging up the results. If you don’t believe me, just do a search for any local real estate term like “Louisville Real Estate” or “Louisville Homes for Sale” in Google. Sure there are some local companies and agents listed, but you will find several non-local companies with local results, like Trulia.

Bottom line, get in local search results now before it becomes overcrowded by the larger companies and dominates the search engine results.