Cre8tive Flow

When your customers or visitors are local, it makes sense to promote your web site to places where the local community will be most likely to look for and find it. Should you bother with local SEO if your web site targets a global market?

In Does Your Business Qualify For Local Seo? Miriam Ellis, of Solas Web Design, writes,

If you serve globally, but also have a physical location from which you can serve locally, Local SEO can be used as a form of keyword expansion that will get you ranking for additional terms that do relate to your business.

The following interview is reprinted with permission by the author, Miriam Ellis. Cre8asiteforums is proud to present her interview with one of our moderators, Donna Swain.

Click to read the original article, where comments can be found for Getting Good Reviews for your B&B, Inn or Hotel - Chat With An Innkeeper.

Greeting from inside the SEOigloo!

After getting such a fine response to my recent Search Engine Guide list of 34 sources from which Google is pulling user review data, I thought it would be nice to follow up with a second article and some tips on getting good reviews for your hospitality industry business. We’re in great good luck to have retired Wine Country innkeeper, Donna Swain, chatting with us today.

An interesting discussion at Cre8asiteforums on the ethics of finding work offers some food for thought and varied opinions. Fishing For Work begins with someone’s frustration over the thousands of web sites he finds that are “awful”. He wants to contact them and offer his services.

Is this a good way to do business?

Is it ethical to approach companies without an invitation to solicit web design work because you don’t like how their web site looks or performs?

Another article has appeared on the topic of SEO and Usability and how these two different skill sets benefit each other. The latest, Usability and SEO. Which comes First?, written for Search Engine Watch by Eric Enge, caught my eye because he wrote:

“What I want to emphasize here is one key point: Usability comes first, and SEO comes second.”

It’s funny to hear that statement coming from a professional SEO.

Now that you’ve attended a conference on search engine marketing and picked up techniques and information, how do you turn that into something marketable for yourself, your clients, or your business?

An attendee of the Search Engine Strategies Conference held in February in New York city is asking, How Can Seo Benefit my Company and my Clients?. She wonders what to present. What data does she need and where does it come from? Why? What matters to clients? Her company? What does she need to convince anyone to invest in SEO?

If you haven’t had a chance to meet Bill Slawski in person, travel on over to Webpronews and soak up a chance to meet via an inspiring interview about local search. You’ll see a video where Bill Slawski and Loren Baker are interviewed by Webpronews’ Mike McDonald.

One of my favorite things about these video interviews is seeing how people I’ve read for the last few years move and interact. So far, I continue to like us all quite a bit. We share an intellectual generosity and curiosity that I treasure.

If you were to restart your main website(s) right now, what would you do differently? Hind sight is 20/20, as they say, so what glaring errors can you see? This question has been on my mind for a while, and a recent thread triggered this post.

For me, it’s probably the content management system (CMS). My oldest website started seven years ago, with the current CMS running for most of that time. Needless to say, it’s showing its age. Sure it’s been tweaked here and there, handling many re-designs, but the backend is not really that modern. It works, but it ain’t pretty.

I’m noticing a theme, and we’re still in the first quarter of the new year. Search marketing tactics, old and new, are pushing the ethical envelope, in new ways. Or it seems that way. For example:

An old discussion on Web Directories equal Web Pollution erupted again when someone passionate about their directories wrote:

“Don’t mind me i have half a brain and 36 quality directories with good PR to give back Quality websites and Blogs.

Why do i do it?

Because i make good money and will make a difference …. now can you say the same???