Geotargeting is an SEO strategy used to focus keyword optimization for a specific geographic location. If you have a geographically centric business such as a real estate office, insurance company, or a local car lot, you should be putting some effort into creating geocentric content for your website or blog.

The basics of geotargeting are relatively easy; you are selling to a specific area, so market to that area with specific keyword modifiers. For example, instead of discussing your new ‘hair style shop’, make sure you modify your keywords with your local city, or nearest large city. Here is my comparison using this example…

Don’t use: ‘We just opened our new hair style shop, and we invite you to come to our open house.’

Do use: ‘We just opened our new Detroit hair style shop, and we invite you to come to our open house.’

By including the location in your copywriting, you are helping your local customers find you more easily, and filtering out all those people who are searching for a style shop in another part of the country.

Additionally, you are reducing the amount of competition you have for the keyword term. There may be several million sites vying for ’style shop’, but only a relative handful competing for ‘detroit style shop’.

You can combine geotargeting with specialty modifiers to reduce competition even further. For instance if you are a style shop that specialized in hair coloring, you might pitch yourself as a ‘detroit style shop for hair coloring’. In this way, you reduce the number of people who compete with you for the key phrase.

Note that by getting so specific, you are also reducing the number of people who will be searching for you to a specific set of customers who may search for a hair color style shop in Detroit. Don’t worry; what you have done is target your optimal customer, which means you have increased your rate of conversion because you have attracted a very specific search to an exact match.

The more general your terms, the more people you may attract, however you will also have to weed through a lot more searchers to get a single conversion. The more specific you can be, the fewer hits you will get, however the hits you do get will be more valuable.

Geotargeting is an important tool in web marketing, especially when you are a geocentric product or service.

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Beehive Credit Union is getting some big attention on the web this week. We are pretty excited about it.

NetBanker, a leading online finance and banking blog dedicated to reporting news about banking innovations, branding, financing and analysis found our Beehive Credit Union blogs and gave them a pretty exciting writeup. You can read the article HERE.

Of particular note, they mention the Beehive Credit Union blogs as evidence of two particular trends:

• Developing a full Web presence from a blogging template
• Creating custom websites for geographic areas or individual branches

We couldn’t agree more; we are seeing more and more customers turning to blog websites as their one and only presence on the web. Blog technology has come a long way and lends itself well to customization. As you have heard us tout many times: blog software such as Wordpress makes it easy to conduct organic marketing on the web with Powerful Custom Content™.

Secondly; creating custom websites for each geographic area of your business is becoming an essential tool as marketers realize that consumers search the web specifically for local services.

An example I will expand on in a future blog is my ‘haircut’ scenario. In a nutshell: you wouldn’t go to a search engine and type in ‘haircut’ because you know it would return every style shop from New York to L.A. Most people know to perform a search including geographic location so that you get only places that offer a ‘haircut’ in ‘yourtown’. This is how consumers search, and how smart marketers are found.

Beehive Credit Union is going at their marketing in a smart way: they have created individual blogs for each of their geographic locations, and customize their content for each location. This will ultimately raise their appeal for geographically localized searches. As a banking service, Beehive knows that their service appeals to a geographically oriented customer. Their personalized hometown approach makes this even more important for them. Delivering content in this way helps them get localized attention; the kind they want.

The NetBanker article about Beehive Credit Union is a great example of how a blog can garner attention for your business. In a case like this, blogs give news outlets something to talk about, and thereby spread the word. Our thanks to NetBanker for running a great story.

Notice, too, that NetBanker gives credit to Jeffry Pilcher at The Financial Brand.com for actually finding the Beehive Credit Union blogs. The Financial Brand found the blogs and posted a link on their Branding Briefs for June 26th.

Take a look at the article by NetBanker. You can find the article here: http://www.netbanker.com

Check out the link from The Financial Brand.com here: http://thefinancialbrand.com

You can see the blogs we are talking about by visiting our previous posting about them, here.

Ready to start your own web marketing campaign? Give us a call at ListPipe.

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Changing content on your website often is one of the most important things you can do in order to maintain a high search rank. Why? Simply put: Search engines are constantly on the lookout for new content to provide to their customers.

The appropriate rate of change depends on your goals. In a moment, I will offer a guideline for change frequency. But first, let me explain why frequency is so important…

Imagine that your website is like a bulletin board at the local coffee shop. As people come in and out of the coffee shop, they browse a look at the bulletin board and scan for something new. If this is their first visit to the coffee shop, they may consider everything to be new, and will be pretty excited about all the information.

On their next visit, the coffee shop customer will be eager to browse the board again. This time, they will recognize a few items, take note of some they missed last time, and notice anything newly posted.

On their third visit, they might notice that nothing has changed. If this is the case, you can bet that on thier fourth visit they will hardly take notice of the bulletin board at all. On subsequent visits, they will learn to ignore it all together. ‘Nothing new to see over there’ they might say.

Your web site is very much like the bulletin board. Search engines look at your site for the first time and get excited about new content. They quickly come back in a week or so to look for new material. If new material exists, they will come more and more frequently so as not to miss anything.

If your site appears stagnant, search engines will visit less and less frequently, reducing visits to as long as six months or more. This is a troublesome spot to be in because you might one day post something to your site that doesn’t get indexed for several months. Bummer; your valuable new announcement will be hidden from the search engines for most of its effective time.

The answer: change (add) content often. Here are some guidelines based on three marketing goals…

1. Subscription or traffic-driven marketing goals. You want to attract users to your site in order to get them to subscribe and return often. You should be posting new content every day. This is a tough thing to do, and only works well in areas where you have a lot to write about. News sites, political blogs, how-to sites, and advice columns are perfect for this high level of frequency.

2. Product sales marketing goals. You have a product that you want to sell, and need to assure that the search engines are keeping you in a good position. Post 2-3 times a week. Make sure your content is relevant, and that you do not stray from your keywords. New content 2-3 times a week will give the search engines something to chew on, and assures that when they do come by, there is something fresh to bring them back soon.

3. Steady organic growth to build credibility. You have a corporate site, or a small business, and want to maintain good search engine credibility without becoming a professional blogger. Post once per week, and never less than twice a month. This will let the search engines know that, while you are not a power house, you have enough going on to maintain interest. Next time you issue an important press release, you will get into the search indexes in a week or two, instead of months.

In every case, make sure your posts are about 300 words, and chock full of relevant keywords. More than 300 words will start to seem like work, and fewer than 300 words will not be enough to convince the search engines that you are really saying something worth while.

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I often have to explain to people why content matters to a website when it comes to marketing online. I usually go with a simple analogy that helps explain how a search engine views your site, and why regular, frequent copy changes are considered so important to your search rank.

Consider the following:

You are out on the town, looking for a fun place to spend the evening. ‘Let’s go to a nightclub’ you might say. So you cruise main street looking for some excitement. As it turns out, you happen upon two candidates, each directly across the street from the other.

On your left is a nightclub seemingly bursting at the seams. People are queued up around the corner waiting to get in, and the place is clearly over crowded and full of life.

On your right is a nightclub that seems to have plenty of room. There is no line, and no crowd. You could get in immediately and would have most of the place to yourself.

Which do you choose? If you are ‘most people’, you will be drawn to the excitement of the crowded nightclub. There are reasons for this…

The crowded nightclub is alive with excitement. People want to be there, and there is life and activity there. Others are clearly interested in getting in, and the overwhelming crowd implies that there is something to see, even if it is ‘itself’. Fun.

Search engines see your site in a similar way.

Search engines deliver a product to their customers. Their customers are you and I when we perform a web search. The results we expect to be relevant, current, and exciting. Search engines, therefore, are on the lookout for exciting places to include in thier search results. Places that have relevant content, and lots of activity are considered better results than sites that are slow, stagnant, and lonely.

The content on your site is what search engines look at in order to determine relevance and excitement. Your site is more exciting when it has new content to share. The frequency of your new content is a major factor, because content becomes old pretty quickly.

Want to get your site to the top of the search engines? Make it exciting with some interesting content. Often.

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One of the goals of ListPipe is to improve your page rank. Page rank is a number between ‘1′ (low) and ‘10′ (high) that Google assigns to your webpage based on a range of criteria. Among those criteria are the quality and relevance of your content, the density of keywords, and the popularity of the site.

From the Google explanation of Page Rank, we learn that:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Some argue that PageRank is no longer as important as it once was. This is not true, and Google’s explanation is good evidence that page rank is still an important factor in your placement in search results.

Google, and the other search engines, are delivering a ‘product’, which is ’search results’. The better the search results they can deliver, the happier their customer (you and all the other searchers in the world) will be. It makes sense for search engines to rank your site based on its relevance and popularity, for these are good indicators of the quality of your site in relation to the search terms.

The higher your page rank, the higher you will place in a search results page.

A great way to improve your site’s search engine page rank is to create regular content that is highly relevant and well written. If you are interested in attracting an audience of viewers to your site, do the following:

1. Start blogging at least once per week at a minimum;
2. Concentrate on including keywords in your content that are relevant to your topic;
3. Make sure that your posts are ‘human readable’, and well written;
4. Be sure to include links to relevant sites and pages, both internal and external to your blog.

And in case you hadn’t noticed: this is what we do for our clients at ListPipe. If you are interested in widening your web marketing, please give us a try; we’re here to help!

Click Here to read Google’s definition of ‘Page Rank’: http://www.google.com/technology/

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ListPipe is designed to help real estate agents create a web presence, and to expand real estate marketing across the web in a search engine optimized strategy.

We are continuously doing research to learn more about marketing our blogs to the real estate marketplace, and working to improve the exposure we bring to our real estate agents who are using ListPipe to widen their web marketing.

If you have a real estate blog, you should be listed on the Real Estate Blogs Directory. You can get their via the link below. I encourage all our real estate marketers to take a few minutes to list your own blog on this remarkable site. It is really quite an opportunity to get your site listed in a busy community.

Real Estate Blogs Directory
- Directory of real estate blogs and blogs of industries affiliated with and
serving the real estate industry.

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We host marketing-specific websites for individual locations, and write Powerful Custom Content for them each week.

Blog Website: We provide a complete blog website, including the hosting, on a custom sub-domain that you can choose during the setup process. We also provide a selection of unique graphics that you can choose for your blog header.

Powerful Custom Content: We research, write, and post a custom article into your blog each week. Each article contains keyword links to your Home site.

Control Panel: You will have the opportunity to create your own username and password, enabling you access to your blog control panel as well as a special control panel in our system that allows you to make changes to your account and access training videos and other special features.

Training: We have produced a collection of training videos that make blogging easier to learn and fund to do.

Widen your web marketing with Powerful Custom Content. Get Started today at www.listpipe.com

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ListPipe is an organic web marketing service that helps improve your site rank in search engines.

To do this, we take advantage of organic search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that work to attract search engines to your site, increase the level of attention they dedicate to you, and raise the search rank they apply.

To facilitate this, we provide a blog website, hosting, and regular, weekly content, written just for you. Our articles are researched, optimized, and professionally written to appeal to search engine traffic.

We emphasize Powerful Custom Content™ with just the right number of keywords, links, and localization.

Ready to widen your web marketing? Get Started today!

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We have been working to improve our system, and have implemented the ability for new customers to select from a growing range of custom sub-domains. This means we can now deliver an automated blog system through ListPipe that provides a little more autonomy from the ListPipe system itself.

We are starting with three new domains to choose from; one from each of our current target markets:

• www.mydentistblog.com
• www.myrealestateagentblog.com
• www.mychiropractorblog.com

When a new customer of ListPipe signs up for a new blog, and subscription to our custom copywriting service, you will have the opportunity to select from one of these domains, and then have the opportunity to name your own sub-domain in the system.

The result is an automated system that allows you to create a blog site such as ‘californiarealestate.myrealestateagentblog.com’. Naming a sub-domain with a keyword modifier provides an important advantage in SEO, and the more relevant domain names will go a long way to help expand our ability to market the blogs within our system.

We are thrilled that we can now deliver more relevant sub-domains for our future customers. Pass this news along to anyone you know in the real estate, dentistry, or chiropractic markets.

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Search engine optimization has many facets. Our focus is on what is called ‘organic content’, which is what search engines look for when measuring the liveliness and relevance of a site. Search engines want to deliver the most relevant and most current sites at the top of search results, so they look specifically for sites that demonstrate recent activity, and relevancy based on keyword frequency.

Our goal is to provide you with a convenient tool that helps you widen your web marketing without you having to become an expert blogger. After all, you have spent plenty of time learning to be great at your profession; leave the web marketing to us. We’ll help you increase your page rank, rise to the top of search results, and attract search engine traffic to your site.

Here is a quick look at some of our key features, and their benefits to you:

• Frequency: We provide one article each week. This is the minimum optimal frequency for posting, and indicates to the search engines that your site content is lively and current. Sites that allow their content to grow stagnant are discounted by search engines as ‘less relevant’ because they do not have current information.
• Keyword Research: We load each article with keywords that are relevant to your industry, and add a second helping of supporting keywords and phrases to help search engines understand your relationship to your market. Keywords, when used properly, help search engines index your site appropriately so that you are listed in the appropriate results
• Linking: We incorporate an advanced linking strategy into every article we publish on your behalf. Each article includes links to your home site from keywords, URLs, and even graphics. All this is coordinated in order to demonstrate to the search engines that your keywords are intimately related to your home site. We also include high-value links to your named associations, and industry-related articles. Our linking strategy is designed to build credibility for your home page by association.
• Localization: Most web searches are for products or services that are local to the user. With this in mind, our content strategy incorporates a mix of localizing keyword modifiers including your location by city, state, and surrounding areas. Establishing yourself as a fixture in a localized community helps you climb to the top of the search results for the most popular searches.
• Customization: The articles that we publish to your blog are customized with your unique information. This creates a one-of-a-kind article that is expressly written just for you. We call this Powerful Custom Content™ that search engines recognize as unique, fresh, and real. The advantage of Powerful Custom Content means that search engines recognize your content as real, human-readable content that is meaningful, and therefore valued highly in search results.
• Marketing: In addition to our Powerful Custom Content, we provide additional marketing support for your blog to help increase the attention you get from the search engines. We incorporate linking strategies to lead search engines to your blog as soon as it is created, and include links to your blog in regular marketing announcements and promotional content. Sites in our system are noticed early, and are provided the advantage of direct links from highly ranked pages.
• Personalization: We have made it easy for you to personalize your own blog with your own content, too. Adding your own content creates even more organic value for your site and we encourage you to add as much content to your site as you can. For your convenience, we provide you with the ability to log into and manage your own blog. Go ahead and add content, upload images, and edit to your heart’s content. To make blogging easy and less intimidating for you, we have included a series of ten instructional videos that visually demonstrate the basics of blogging.

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