In this installment of Expert Interview we had the pleasure of reaching out to Todd Malicoat to discuss various topics on the link building industry. Todd (aka stuntdubl) has over 10 years of experience in internet marketing and 5 years experience consulting on search marketing management at an executive level.  As the SEO faculty chair for MarketMotive.com, Todd leads a comprehensive online marketing curriculum. He’s been an active international conference speaker on various online topics, at events such as,  Search Engine Strategies, Webmaster World Pubcon, Search Marketing Expo, Affiliate Summit, and Dreamforce. Todd has also developed a process to find, negotiate, and purchase undervalued websites like CollegeDegree.com. This proprietary process for identifying and redeveloping web properties is the foundation for Todd’s current and future ventures. He also created the KOB analysis which is a formula which can be used to evaluate the cost vs. benefits of a particular keyword phrase for use in campaign planning.

As a thought leader in the online business world he has been named among the top 50 Most Influential Marketer’s of 2008 and 2009 by Invesp.com, and named Top 40 Most Influential in Search Marketing by GSInc.co.uk in 2007. He has been cited by Inc. Magazine, The Sydney Herald, Website Magazine, The New York Post, Infoworld, and many other media outlets on search, reputation management, social media, and other web related issues. Todd also runs a blog that covers all areas of web traffic acquisition called Stuntdubl.com – that echoes his mantra of “Getting hit by traffic…not cars.”

Elise Redlin-Cook: Hi Todd! So tell me, how has link building changed since you first got into the industry?

Todd Malicoat: Link building has changed a lot over the years, mainly due to the volume of unsolicited requests, and the fact that webmasters are becoming more educated on the value of a link.  Unfortunately, the web has become a rather jaded place since, as webmasters, we’ve had to delete hundreds of “will you link to me” emails. It seems that everyone and their brother want to get a bit of link boost juice poured into their site.

Elise: A jaded place you say… That’s an interesting observation since it seems that everyone today is talking about the importance of being personal in link requests. What’s your take on this and how do you accomplish that?

Todd:I think you have to write link requests that you wouldn’t be afraid to put your name and face to. This includes creating content that you’re proud enough of to show to someone you respect.

The most important aspects I find useful in creating personalized link requests include, finding the webmasters name, describing something on their site to prove you actually researched it, finding a common ground (like being a webmaster), and figuring out what you can help them with in return (like fixing a broken link). It’s really the same kind of process you would go through if asking someone you know face to face. It’s about relationships and the give and take.

Elise: Speaking of personalized requests, can you tell us a story of a time you acquired a link in a creative manner.

Todd: I’m not sure how creative it is, but I’ve often given an hour or more of free consulting to get a link from a relevant high quality website to one of my sites. It’s cliche, but creative content will always be the best approach for acquiring links, and people will rarely share their stories unless they want those links to stop passing value.

Elise: What do you believe are the biggest challenges in link building today?

Todd: The biggest challenge in link building is having a highly linkable value proposition and making it easy for people to link to you.  Your website has to have something that encourages or incentivizes people to link to your website.  If you don’t, you are stuck buying or begging for links.  Begging for links is a difficult proposition, essentially due to the abysmal response rates of jaded webmasters.

Another big challenge in link building is convincing the upper management of a company that links are necessary to bottom line sales.  It’s difficult to quantify ROI on link building campaigns, but good companies know it’s essential to top in search rankings, which turns into real world dollars.  Teaching management the value of a link is very important to building a successful link campaign. You can’t build links without a budget for it. Wiep Knol has also created a great guide to the link value factors on his website.

Elise: You mentioned that if you don’t have good content you might be stuck buying or begging for links. What is your take on paid links?

Todd: I think almost ALL links are paid for in one way or another.  Purchasing links has become a moral gray area that is muddied by the size of your brand.  I’ve always defended the right to purchase links, which has unfortunately gotten me classified as a “Blackhat SEO” at times (I’m not).  I’m a competitive realist, and I realize that regardless of your stance on paid links, the web is a capitalist economy. The act of buying text links for higher search rankings is inevitable.  It is very difficult for a search engine to quantify intent, and even when they can, we get into another sticky area of search engines making moral decisions (like not allowing the sale of term papers via adwords).

Personally, I think there should be some disclaimer given about soliciting links based solely on PR.  Toolbar page rank is now “for entertainment purposes only” and is a very poor metric for measuring link juice.  Mozrank from SEOmoz, or proprietary indicators, are much better for judging how valuable a link will be to your website.

Elise: A great link mixes high PR/domain strength with relevance. If you could only choose high PR or relevance, which would it be?

Todd: As any good SEO would and should do, I will often choose one over the other based on the circumstance.  Relevance is important for specific terms, so I would always take a relevant link from the site in the number one position for the term I’m targeting, over a link that has higher PR. That is assuming they are at least relatively close in terms of link popularity value.

Elise: With the dance with Google that all link builders do, how do you foresee this niche changing in the future?

Todd: Link building will ultimately just become a function of the public relations department and the responsibility of those in charge of advertising.  It will increasingly become the elephant in the room that everyone knows is important, but is rarely discussed.  It will just become a part of other marketing and advertising projects

Elise: Do you have any insights to share with a newcomer to a field?

Todd: There are some amazing resources to learn SEO these days.  You don’t have to learn from lots of different forums and blogs anymore. There are places to get up to speed quickly.  My personal favorite is Market Motive Internet Marketing Training (because I’m involved of course), but I highly encourage people to read and join SEOmoz and SEObook as well.  There are lots of other great resources and places to learn the important aspect of search and online marketing.  It’s really a great field that still has huge opportunities for growth and advancement, so congratulations to new folks on finding a good place to be.

As Todd suggested, there are many great and helpful tools out there to help new or old members of the industry. The key is to not be afraid of the industry, create meaningful relationships, and use your best skill sets to move you forward in the internet marketing world. Have any other great link building tips to share?

Elise Redlin-Cook

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog.

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This installment of Expert Interviews focuses once again on the discipline of link building. This week, I had the opportunity to speak with Wil Reynolds, the founder and CEO of SEER Interactive, a Philadelphia based SEO firm. He has dedicated himself to doing two things well: driving traffic to sites from search engines and analyzing the impact that traffic has on the bottom line of companies. He and his organization are also focused on giving back to the community. SEER Interactive requires that every team member participate in philanthropic activity in order to share their success with others. Wil currently sits on the advisory board of Convenant House, an organization that works with runaway youth in the Philadelphia area. He has also volunteered with Alex’s Lemonade Stand, helping to raise awareness for childhood cancer issues.

Elise Redlin-Cook: How has link building changed since you first got into the industry?

Wil Reynolds: Oh goodness! Link building didn’t even matter when I first started.  It wasn’t a factor at all, my first two years in SEO mostly everything I did was based on keyword density and IP delivery of your pages, with Fantomasters tool to make sure your competitors couldn’t figure out what density you used.  The other thing I think shocks the heck out of people about the “old days” is that there were legitimately 10 search engines all vying for market share.  Sure Yahoo and Altavista were dominant, but they were not so dominant that you could ignore Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, and others.  So we used the script to also do IP delivery for each engine, so each one got served a page based on what we thought they liked.  It was crazy.  Back then we wouldn’t even use a client’s main domain to rank well, that is how little domain history mattered in ’99 through mid 2000.

Not until Google came on the scene did we have to really worry about link building.  When Google did come on the scene, we all did the basic big directories, right, Yahoo, Dmoz, etc.  And then you mostly did reciprocal linking, and voila you have rankings.

Today you really have to be a creative marketer, as well a technical pro to be a good link builder.  For instance, you have to have the wit to see link building opportunities in things others do not. That is a marketing mind, right?  But the technical mind needs to understand how to create advanced queries and the like to find opportunities.  The people who are too creative are not good for link building, because creativity doesn’t scale without the technical know how to build queries, high level Excel sheets w/ macros, etc etc.

I’ve always been overweighted at SEER on marketing talent over technical talent. I mean no one on our team could code a web page from notepad for our first six years of existence, but we knew how to connect with people, and how to develop resources that people would care about. That is the marketing mind.

Today I’d also say that link building is so complicated that without some kind of tool to help you reverse engineer the link graph, you are going to be a sitting duck, in anything remotely competitive.  Google has challenged all of us to actually develop content that people will actually want to talk about, share, etc if you want long-term rankings. Sure some unscrupulous stuff will always work, but if you want to build long-term rankings that can drive a business for the long haul you have to consider balancing aggressive tactics that work today with building links that Google will always value.

Elise: So, Wil what’s your take on paid links?

Wil: My take on paid links is simple, don’t over do it.  First, try to actually succeed without them.  In so many industries, I watch people buy links, putting themselves or their clients at risk unnecessarily. Don’t start off taking the easy way out, I’d say for any project you should never start off using paid links, you may not need them to be successful, so why take the risk?

Second, you never want to be the most aggressive in your space.  I say look at 2-3 sites that are outranking you, look at how they are doing it and make sure you are a lot less aggressive than they are. Let them be the “canary in the mine” so to speak, who catches the Google smackdown first. NEVER be the most aggressive.  Also never use a network, create your own relationships.

Third, What I try to do (and it is very hard) is when you see someone paying for links to be successful, look at the crap links they are paying for and find a way to do it white hat. I recently had a link broker call me about buying .edu links (ummmm no thank you!). But as he shared the network with me it got me thinking…why wouldn’t our clients who can speak to different college groups, not be willing to offer discounts, promos, scholarships, etc in exchange for promotion.  Which could be a logo, or it could be a text link, either way this is how the world has worked for ages for regular old marketing.  Now I have a link that might actually be valuable for the members of a group, which means the traffic alone is worth it, and the extra boost for search engine rankings is gravy.

Today you really have to be a creative marketer, as well a technical pro to be a good link builder. For instance, you have to have the wit to see link building opportunities in things others do not. That is a marketing mind, right?

Elise: Fantastic advice! Well, I’ve often heard that a great link mixes high PR/domain strength with relevance. If you could only choose high PR or relevance, which would it be?

Wil: For now I’d choose neither one of them, I’d choose anchor text.  One of the things I have been preaching at conferences I am attending is a lesson I learned the hard way.  We had a client targeting one of the most competitive words I have ever targeted, it is definitely more competitive than trying to get ringtones on the first page of Google was two years ago (yeah we went after ringtones for a client two years ago, and they are still on page 1 for the singular even though we haven’t worked with them in two years – that’s long-term quality link building.).

Anyway, what I learned with this competitive space for this client was that the links they got from the New York Times, Shape magazine, Cosmo, Oprah magazine, Men’s Health, and every other major magazine about health in about a six month period did nothing to lift their rankings.  It was a gut punch to me and my team. We followed all the rules and did not get rewarded.  So we started building relationships with bloggers, running contests, one of our team members even went as far as creating a national day for the client.  The national day was picked up on several radio stations and many relevant sites in their space…today they rank between 5-7, back when they got all these links from  these major magazines they did not improve, they stayed in the low 20′s.

It was disappointing to see that in a space littered with spam on page 1 that getting into highly reputable magazines did not serve as signal to Google that we were a legit site doing things right, instead they continued to reward the spammers.  Very often sites with very high PR archive horribly, so what ends up happening is that no real juice flows down to the link you have, rendering it not very valuable – that is my take at least on print publications with online sites.  They are notorious ball hogs, who don’t link out too.

We probably went over budget by about 2x the hours for that project, but it was one of our biggest successes as a company.  And we learned a lot about what really works in the search engines.

Elise: Wow! That’s a great point. So, can you tell us a story of a time you acquired a link in a creative manner.

Wil: I think throughout this interview I have been giving examples of how we acquire links in a creative manner, but one of the things that totally changed the way we did link building happened while visiting a client in San Francisco.  They have two dogs in the office, and in passing someone mentioned that the dogs are on Twitter and sometimes tweet on the company’s behalf.

Hearing that (this is where the creative side helps) I googled dogs who tweet, cats who tweet, etc. Found tons of lists, and even a USA Today article, that linked to the accounts of animals who tweet, which led me to look for sites that talked about dogs in the office and how it is managed, which created opportunities for interviews for the client, along with ending up in lists.

Elise: Hmmm. So how do you see link building changing?

Wil: Ummmm, well with Matt Cutts announcing that Google is going to be working hard on spam this year I expect it to be a very fun year for link building.  I would expect that this is the year that Google gets it right and realizes that getting anchor text is difficult, so hopefully the days of begging people to link to you with anchor text ends this year.  I’m not holding my breath, but I am hopeful.  Then I can build on topic links, and let the relevancy count as my “anchor text”.  Right now 80-90% of the anchor text links people get don’t include anchor text naturally, but if you go build a bunch of relevant links without anchor text you will lose in the short term, your clients will leave you, and your reputation as an SEO will be tarnished. Even though you are doing what is right and following Google’s rules, you know?

I really am looking forward to that day.

I think most link builders would second Wil’s sentiment and are long awaiting the day that relevance beats out anchor text in the game of value in Google’s eyes. Aren’t you?

Elise Redlin-Cook

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog.

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As the New Year approaches, there has been a good deal of conversation focused on what will or won’t happen in 2011. To me, there is no better time to ask those around me for their personal predictions on what the New Year will usher in when it comes to internet marketing. Here is what some of the staff here at Vertical Measures think that we can all expect of the coming year in internet marketing:

“It may sound overused and cliché, but Local Search is huge and is only getting bigger by the week. Embracing, as well as understanding, the constantly moving target of local search and how companies can improve listings will continue to be the key to success for businesses of all sizes. Another very obvious prediction is that mobile search will continue its’ explosive growth. As more and more cell phones become web enabled and fully integrated with search, mobile search optimization will become a necessity for all published sites.” -Jason Hendricks, SEO Strategist

“I think the Internet marketing industry will flourish in 2011, as more and more people are continuously seeing its value.  I also believe that content will become increasingly important – content strategy, marketing, creation and distribution – as it all starts and ends with content, in my eyes.

Additionally, I believe local search is going to thrive, as search engines seem to be relying more and more on customer reviews.  I think brick and mortar businesses are going to spend more time on optimizing their sites and link building efforts with geospecific terms, as it is becoming essential. I also believe social media will continue to boom throughout the New Year, with search engines taking social cues into account.” -Abby Gilmore, Internet Marketing Specialist

“Big picture I think the Internet marketing industry will continue to pick up steam. It’s become an established fact that the future of most industries is on the Internet, and I expect even professionals like lawyers and accountants that have been slow to use the Internet for marketing purposes will jump on board as well.

For those already in the industry, I think varied anchor text will make a huge difference this year. In the past the thought was that you want to target specific anchor text that you can get ranking in the search engines, but now we’re seeing that you want to have a much more natural link profile.  If the majority of your links target one keyword and one page then you are in trouble. Internet marketing specialists will take greater care in ensuring that everything is natural, mixing in that targeted anchor text with more naturally looking links.

Content will also be pushed to the forefront. If you want high quality links you will first need to build great content, and I believe the truly superb content will rise to the top in 2011.” -Michael Schwartz, Internet Marketing Specialist

“Predict the unpredictable, and more huge changes to come from Google. In the past year we have seen so much, from personalized search, real time results and the merge of local results, I’d expect more of the same, combining everything into one result page, meaning you need a complete campaign, and can’t focus solely in one area.” -James Constable, Link Strategy Specialist

“I think local search will really level the playing field in 2011. Having a well rounded internet marketing strategy that encompasses social media, local search, link worthy content, onsite optimization, and reputation management will be increasingly important. But at the heart of this is determining what internet marketing efforts are actually providing true return on investment, and more and more agencies and SEOers will need to prove that their efforts provide return.

In my opinion varying keywords and understanding semantic analysis to get at the heart of what SEM is all about will come to the forefront in 2011. Year after year we have to step up our game, and 2011 should be no different. “ -Kaila Strong, Social Media Architect

“I predict that local search as well as content marketing will continue to grow in importance and become leading topics discussed amongst Internet marketers. It will become absolutely necessary for businesses to integrate a local search marketing strategy as well as a content marketing strategy into their marketing plans.” -Sarah Moraes, Internet Marketing Specialist

“More demand for proof of ROI.  More ways to measure ROI (and how they work together:  # of links, value of links, rankings, traffic, conversions, # of fans, etc.  Bigger emphasis on leveraging content you already have and repurposing it.  Less focus on just links and more focus on holistic approach. Better understanding how digital marketing integrates with overall marketing budget.” -Patty Adams, Director of Client Solutions

“My prediction for 2011 is that the Internet Marketing industry will have to adapt to all of the new changes, especially with local results taking the lead in search and social media influencing rankings, as well as anticipate continuing updates to the Google algorithm.” -Kristi Hines, Internet Marketing Specialist

“Multi-channel online marketing takes hold. Your customers are online, searching for you. Are you there? The recession has altered how consumers use the web, as research has become the dominant factor when making a purchase. They are not just searching for product reviews, but consumers are now bargain conscious and are searching multiple times across multiple channels before committing to a purchase.  Recent research indicates that consumers are still very hesitant to click on ads, instead today’s online consumer is more savvy and is spending time doing more research before making a purchase.  To me this means multi-channel marketing is more important than ever. Your customers are looking for you online. Marketers must look at developing optimized content for multiple channels whether it be your company blog, location based, coupons sites, news feeds, video sites, or social media interactions.” -Arnie Kuenn, President

Do you have your own internet marketing prediction? Add it in the comments below!

Elise Redlin-Cook

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog.

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Guest Post By: Adam Courtney, Internet Marketing Intern

We have been fortunate enough at Vertical Measures to have had the opportunity to conduct Expert Interviews with leaders in the internet marketing industry.  At the beginning of the year, we asked many of these leaders what their predictions were for the industry in 2010.  Now that we are wrapping up the year in just about a week, it is time to determine who truly holds the crystal ball of internet marketing.  The following are a few predictions and our analysis of whether or not they were correct for 2010.

Fred Von Graf, managing partner of Social Media AZ.

Prediction: “There is going to be a mobile blowout.  It’s the year of the Droid as far as I’m concerned.”

Consensus for 2010: Correct.  Android Market Share has jumped from 3.5% during the 3^rd quarter of 2009 to 25.5% in the 3^rd quarter of 2010.  During the same period, smartphone sales increased an amazing 96% as well.

Prediction: “We are going to see much more women-based targeting in social media.”

Consensus: According to an article by Forbes, Facebook and other top social media sites are dominated by female users.  Also, in a survey done by the e-commerce software firm ATG, twice as many women as men said they frequently share purchasing activities on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  Comscore recently published a report with similar information including facts that women spend more time online than men, and that they also make more online purchases then men.  Based off this information, there is little doubt that companies are increasing their female-based targeting.

David Wallace, CEO of SearchRank

Prediction:  “Google is still going to have 70-80% market share, Bing will continue to grow.   Local search will also continue to grow.”

Consensus for 2010: Correct.  While Google market share has dropped a bit in the last year, it still is currently at about 70%.  However, Bing is currently the fastest growing search engine, now owning about 10% of market share.

David is also correct about local search.  According to (Curtis) R. Curtis, CEO of Sharksfly Marketing Inc, 75% of all business online searches are locally related and that number is growing.

Jeramie McPeek, Vice President of Interactive Services for the Phoenix Suns.

Prediction: “I think it’s almost going to become commonplace where almost every athlete has their own Twitter account and has their own Facebook page…more and more athletes are going to become almost their own reporters.”

Consensus for 2010: Mostly Correct.  While not every professional athlete has embraced Twitter and Facebook, there’s no doubt that social media is playing a bigger role in sports today.  From news about player trades to the firing of coaches, a whole new sports media outlet has been developed from social media.  Instead of holding traditional radio and television press conferences, more and more professional athletes and coaches are choosing to utilize social media instead.

Jeff Walters is the co-founder of two leading marketing companies, Targetbase and Clicksquared. He is also an investor, catalyst and consultant at Strategy Outfitters, a company known for building brands through business analysis, marketing strategy, and marketing technologies.

Prediction: Businesses will focus more on ROI and how to measure it.

Consensus: Correct.  Social media is still extremely new.  Facebook is only 6 years old; Twitter is 4 years old.  Many businesses have only just started to utilize these and other social media outlets as marketing tools.  As explained in a very informative article on Mashable, many of these businesses are still launching social media campaigns with an experimental outlook.  However, more and more executives are demanding that ROI and metrics be determined for their companies’ social media campaigns.  Many of these campaigns have been introduced without an integrated strategy, leading to frustrations about how beneficial they really are.  A study from Bazaarvoice and the CMO Club found that nearly three out of four CMOs (72%) who did not attach revenue assumptions to social media in 2009 say that they would in 2010; in addition, 64% of CMOs say they plan to invest more in social media in the next year.

Prediction: “Businesses will continue to shift towards digital spending.”

Consensus: Correct.  Not surprisingly, businesses are continuing to shift more money towards digital spending.  According to Forbes, digital spending increased 10% in 2010 to 32.5%, putting it above spending for print advertising at 30.3%.

Greg Head, founder and CEO of New Avenue, a strategic marketing firm

Prediction: “This next year is really the year that small businesses really start to get social media integrated into their businesses and start to deliver richer content.”

Consensus for 2010: Correct.  A study by the marketing advisor Constant Contact found that “small businesses reported an increased use of social media tools, viewing these tools as additive and complementary to other marketing activities.”  In addition, 63% cited Facebook and 30.7% cited Twitter as important tools for marketing, up from 50.5% and 25.6%, respectively.

Overall we believe our industry experts did an excellent job of predicting digital trends for 2010.  What are your thoughts about 2010?  Do you agree with these industry experts or was there anything else that they missed for 2010?

Elise Redlin-Cook

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog.

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With all of the changes recently rolled out by Google in November 2010, it is now more important than ever to pay attention to local search marketing and to have a plan for your local business. That is why that this month Vertical Measures invites you to attend our webinar tomorrow, December 9th “Local Search Marketing in the Age of Google Places,” at 11:30 a.m. EST (8:30 a.m. PST, 10:30 a.m. CST), presented by Sarah Moraes (Local Search Marketing Specialist).  I was also thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Chris “Silver” Smith, a noted SEO expert and internet technologist who has been widely cited for his work in industry trade and national news. He is a frequent speaker at various internet conferences such as Search Marketing Expo, and he writes on search marketing for Search Engine Land and other news and information services about all of this change in the local search arena.

Elise Redlin-Cook: Google recently made massive change to their local search algorithm, combining local search results with the organic results. What impact do you feel this change will have on the local search marketing industry?

Chris Silver-Smith: It’s brought the importance of local search rankings to the forefront, and made many more people aware of it. Heretofore, many SEO experts have been fairly ignorant of local search ranking elements, and now they are feeling the pressure to get up-to-speed, rapidly!

Now that local results are taking up far more of the search results page real estate, and local is being assumed for a great many more keyword phrases, many companies really are confronted with having no choice about ignoring local search – they must now factor it in or lose visibility.

Elise: What is an effective, comprehensive local search marketing strategy comprised of? Onsite optimization? Link building? Content? Citations? All of the above?

Chris: A good local marketing strategy must include all of the above, and more. For highly competitive industry verticals/markets, playing around with just one aspect of local search marketing will be insufficient to achieve competitive top rankings.

Elise: What are the most important steps a webmaster should take to ensure a website is properly optimized for local search?

Chris: Focus on inclusion of relevant keyword phrases. If you don’t mention your city name or variations of your business category keywords, your site is going to be less-relevant from the get-go. And, out of all on-page factors, insure your page Titles are individualized.

Elise: Great advice! So, what are the most important local search sites that a business should get listed on today?

Chris: InsiderPages, CitySearch, Superpages, Yelp, and YP.com – these are a good start.

Elise: Got it! When creating a business listing with Google Places, what are the most important fields that a business owner should complete and can you provide any tips for creating an optimal listing?

Chris: Care should be taken to insure that all the basic information is correct and consistent. Do not list your business name in nine different ways on every different directory site. Secondly, of prime importance are the business categories — use accurate, common, popular terms which consumers would search upon to find your type of business. And, do not include geographic terms or product names in Category fields, since this could get you penalized. Providers offering services in more than just their city of address should also look at defining a service area, and mentioning those additional top city names in their business description.

Elise: Google seems to be weighing reviews more heavily recently. How important is it for a business to have a lot of reviews? Does it matter if they are positive or negative?

Chris: My recent column at Search Engine Land outlines much of the basics for good ratings/reviews strategy.

Having multiple, genuine reviews from multiple authoritative business directory sources is quite valuable. It appears that general “buzz” about a business provides benefit, although Google’s recent penalization of “Decor My Eyes” indicates that having nearly all bad reviews might be a negative weighting factor now.

For some verticals such as hotels and accommodations, businesses may live or die based upon overall ratings. For other business types this may be influential to a lesser degree with consumers.

Overall, positive/negative sentiment is not heavily influential, but a good strategy for encouraging consumer reviews in an ongoing manner will be valuable for producing ongoing “buzz”, and the traditional influence of reviews may affect overall conversion rates.

Elise: Tags can be applied to listings, making them more noticeable in the local search results. Do you think these listings have a leg up in the rankings? Is Google placing them higher in the results because they’re paid?

Chris: No, I don’t believe there’s any direct benefit to rankings due to the attention-getting tag ads. There may, however, be a mild indirect affect, as these ads could increase traffic to those businesses listings, resulting in consumers interacting with them more.

This overall activity could translate down the line into signals which Google does indeed take into account in their rankings.

Elise: How important is it for a webmaster to integrate rich snippets for location specific information into their website content?

Chris: To clarify, webmasters do not really integrate rich snippets — they can use semantic markup of their content to enable Google to display rich snippets in the search results, though. I’ve long believed there are benefits to including this sort of markup. For local, it helps Google to identify businesses and correctly associate their website content with their listings. As more rich snippet treatments are rolled-out, it also provides a bit more attention-getting content in the SERPs, which can enhance click-through rates.

Microformats, RDFa and Microdata do not give ranking benefit, but do reduce chances of misinterpretation and prove promotional value as attention-getting listing treatment.

Elise: Google recently released Hotpot, a personalized recommendation engine based on what you like and what your friends like. While it’s completely separate for now, do you see it being integrated as a part of personalized search results in the future? What could the impact be for local businesses and local search marketers?

Chris: Google’s Lat Long blog this past week confirmed that Hotpot would influence personalization of search results, so I think it’s definitely an area to watch. Online reputation and good customer relations may ultimately be the best ways to insure your local listings have advantage in personalized search results!

Elise: Do you have any tools for keyword research, link building, listing creation, etc., that you find useful for local search marketing?

Chris: I’ll mention that I’m pleased with LocationMonitor.com, a new service rolled-out recently by Universal Business Listing. (Disclosure: I’m on UBL’s Board of Advisors.) The service will allow you to rapidly see how your business’s information is displayed across dozens of influential local sites, simultaneously. I think that for busy proprietors of small businesses, this is the sort of tool they will need to use to try to manage their presence across multiple online channels, in addition to monitoring what people are saying about them online.

Elise: What are some of the mistakes that you see novices in local search marketing consistently make?

Chris: Do not attempt to post fake reviews of your own business! Most local marketers and employees of local businesses do not have sufficiently sophisticated understanding of how reviews sites police their reviews in order to be able to pull it off, and they’re unaware of the possible negative consequences. It’s also illegal! Further, since the effort it takes to do fake reviews could more effectively be invested in developing best-practice processes for encouraging natural reviews from real customers, I advise that this be avoided.

Elise: Are there any tips that you could offer a local search newbie to help them get started?

Chris: Read my articles? Seriously, though, my advice to do-it-yourselfers is to provide as much, rich information about your business as possible, in as many online directories and local search engines as you can find. And, try to interact with your customers on these sites and via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in an ongoing, consistent basis. Having a solid foundation of info about your company out there, topped off with an ongoing dialog about your business will give you a presence and ongoing buzz that frequently helps with local search rankings.

It sure sounds like there is a lot to absorb regarding the changes in the location based search landscape and Chris has certainly given some great advice here on what can be done to improve your rankings. Do you have any tips that you can add?

Elise Redlin-Cook

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog.

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