For small businesses, facing their industry’s big names in the search engines can be a no-win situation.  Think Asda versus a corner shop, Tony and Guy versus a small hairdresser and Stagecoach versus a local drama school.  By focusing on national SEO (thanks to much smaller resources) a local business is unlikely to ever appear alongside these business behemoths at all.  And we all know that it is a rare person who bothers to click onto the second page of Google.  Never mind pages 3, 4 and 5.

In 2006, iProspect, a search engine marketing firm based in Massachusetts, USA, stated in their White Paper Search Engine User Behavior Study, “The importance of appearing high in the search results has increased over time… more search engine users are clicking on the first page now (62% [2006]) than in 2004 (60%) than in 2002 (48%).  Inversely, fewer search engine users are willing to click on results past the third page now (10% [2006]) than in 2004 (13%) than in 2002 (19%).  Fast-forward to 2009 – and assuming  that these trends have continued, a business’ appearance in the first pages front of the search engines results, is more crucial than ever.

More recently, AOL released figures on CTR (click through rates) for the different positions in their index. The data set was sufficiently high enough to be considered accurate and thus can be expected to reflect traffic levels across most search engines – Google included. According to AOL’s results, only 10% of all searches resulted in clicks beyond page 1 of the results.

Yet, many small businesses bring SEO failure upon themselves, by not distinguishing between local SEO and national SEO.  Local SEO is similar to national SEO – but with one notable difference.  The keywords and content (images and information) are geographically specific.  While national SEO focuses on broad keywords, such as “Plumbers”, local SEO uses local modifiers:  “Plumbers, St. Albans, Hertfordshire”. And while the traffic will be lower in local SEO campaigns, they will pull in more qualified prospects.  After all, a plumber in Chester is of no use to an overflowing toilet in St. Albans.  Optimising locally also helps to build local relationships. In his 2008 book “The Complete SEO Copywriting Guide for Search Engine Rankings and Sales Conversion – Content Rich”, Jon Wuebben estimates that every month a billion local searches are made, and that it’s growing at a rate of 20-30% every year.

Thanks to recent algorithmic changes by Google over the last 12 months or so,the likelihood of locals finding you when they type in “Your Trade, Your Town” is now much higher.  Nobody really knows precisely what Google has done, or is currently doing for that matter – we only know what works and what does not through our own exhaustive testing.  What we do know, however,, is that Google is increasingly placing much more emphasis on local and geographical searches.  It has even been rumoured that  soon, users will be able to search Google within their own geographic parameters. So by modifying their sites to target local keyword phrases, local businesses will undoubtedly see significant improvement in their search engine placement – especially as local or geographic keyword phrases have much less competition anyway. The modifications required to optimise locally,  include  placing the chosen geographic keyword in the following areas:

• Title Tag <title>
• Meta Description Tag  <Meta description=”…”>
• Heading Tags <H1>, <H2> etc
• In the page content (bolding them for added weight, if possible)
• In an Alt tag or two
• In the footer of the home page

But remember NOT to keyword stuff- once or twice per tag type or content section should be sufficient.

Google’s Keyword Tool is a great tool with which to find effective keyword phrases: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal.  Here, a business is able to generate keyword ideas in two ways – by getting Google to scan the contents of their own website, or by inserting descriptive keywords (for example, “clothes shop Bath”).  Once one of these methods is selected, they insert either the URL of their website, or a few keyword phrases into the search box. The results page will reveal, not only related search terms, but also the average search volume per month.

A free Google Maps Listing will go nicely with these newly modified search terms.  It’s a highly effective way for local businesses to build up an online presence.  In fact, it’s a must.  To make use of this powerful tool, a local business must first create an account at https://www.google.com/accounts/ With this account, the business will be able to sign into  Google’s Local Business Centre http://www.google.com/local/add?hl=en-gb&gl=gb.  And it is here that they can create their free listing – including their contact details, opening hours and even product images and YouTube video.   Once a business has been verified and included in Google Maps, it can edit the contents at any time.

As well as making it even easier for local customers to find local companies, using this tool gives local businesses a second bite at the cherry to appear on that coveted first page.  This is because, in the majority of cases, Google will stick up to 10 of these listings ABOVE the normal organic results, when a geographic keyword is used. Go try it – search Google for plumbers + your town or city and see what happens!

Yahoo Local is another excellent local SEO resource. It offers a similar service to Google’s Maps Listing.  It’s not free however – the price varies according to the business location and the keyword phrase utilised.  But as all BT Internet users have Yahoo as their default search engine, it comes with a huge advantage.  Think of all those potential customers!

Other tips…

A further advantage of local SEO over national SEO, is that the popularity of famous landmarks or buildings in any given town, can be leveraged.  Let’s say you have a clothes shop in Brighton.  By simply embedding a picture of The Royal Pavilion on your site, for example (assuming it has been tagged appropriately), you’re likely to pull in a heap of local traffic.

Allowing customers to leave reviews on your website is another great promotional tool.  As your customers are likely to know you personally, they’ll be more likely to leave favourable reviews.  And as the readers of these reviews are likely to be other locals, the reviews will hold more credibility than those that appear on more corporate and national websites.  In this way, local trust and credibility is built.

If you are a business that gets most of its custom from the local market, yet are still relying on national SEO techniques to get you high up in the search engines, then you are risking your website disappearing into the depths of the internet altogether.

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For some reason, all of us are charging a premium for Windows hosting, our initial reaction was to scrap this charge!!

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT WE DID!!! – No more extra charges for windows hosting at INSTA Host.  Same Great Price, Same Great Service, Same Great Hosting!!!

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How often do you back up your website?

We have updated our back up facility within your control panel so that larger sites can now backup their sites quickly and with the minimum of fuss. We would strongly recommend backing up your site at least once a week to ensure you are not susceptible to any data loss.

Using our CP to back up your site is so easy there really is no excuse not do it. All you have to do is log in to your INSTA Host Customer Center and access your  control panel. Once you are in your CP  click on “Backup/ restore” found in the “File” section. From here you can choose to create a full back up of your site of pick and choose from your list of directories with just a click of the mouse. This will download your website as a zip file to your computer. Job done!

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Please take a look at our community software….http://www.instacommunity.co.uk which can be purchased at our INSTA turnkey store HERE

Following on from our recent post about Hitwise’s research in to social networking in the UK yet more research is pointing to social networks as being THE growth area online.

Nielson Online has released findings in to the use of social networking around the globe and from a virtual standing start a few years ago their category has exploded in to 4th place.

Grouped with blogs to create a category named “Member communities” they have now over taken email and are only behind search engines, portals and PC software (I’d argue ‘adult sites’ would be in there somewhere if they were not consciously excluded in this type of research).

Other stats that jump out are:

- 67% of their research panel use member community sites

- 1 in every 11 minutes online are spent on these sites

- The 35 – 49 age category saw the biggest increase in uptake

- UK mobile web users are the most likely to access these sites through a hand set than any other country

- 69% of the UK online audience visit a member community site

Social networking doesn’t really offer anything new in terms of what you can do (posting on a board, send a message, chat online, share images…) but what is different bringing  all of these in to one handy place where our ‘friends’ can access them.

I wonder how it will be before we can search the internet from Facebook?

This looks like a great time to jump on to the social networking band wagon and our addition of social networking software Elgg to our CGI one-click  Internet  library of one click install programs lets you to take full advantage.

You can read Nielson’s press release summary here: http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090309.pdf (PDF)

PS, dont forget that we offer a fully installed INSTA community over at http://www.instasite.biz

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To avoid becoming spam, we have given ourselves some guidelines you can expect us to follow…

What we will tweet about:

• Links to useful 3rd party research, tools and resources
• Twitter exclusive competitions
• Blog update alerts
• Twitter exclusive promo codes
• Updates on new product features that benefit you

What we won’t tweet about:

• Updates on the weather
• What we had for lunch
• Links to our corporate press releases
• Our weekend plans (unless they are particularly awesome)

Follow us: http://twitter.com/instahost_co_uk

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We have updated a number of the scripts you can install from the CP  to the latest version:

WordPress upgraded to V2.6.1

PHPCoin upgraded to V1.4.4

Joomla upgraded to V1.5.6

Locked Area Lite upgraded to V6.0

Mambo upgraded to V4.6.5

RoundCube upgraded to V0.2-aplha

Website Search upgraded to V1.5b

AWStats upgraded to V6.8

ZenCart upgraded to V1.3.8a

Openads upgraded to V2.6.0

Web Calendar upgraded to V2.9.3a

You might be interested to know that keeping the scripts we provide up-to-date is quite a big job, on average it takes 3 hours to update each one and on occasions when major changes are made to the script it can take a few days. Some scripts like Joomla and WordPress release a new version every few weeks!

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As many of you will know, we have been working hard here at INSTA Host for the last few months on a programme to upgrade all our webservers. We took the decision to do this because some of the early webservers were now four years old. Although they had all been excellent servers and not given us any significant problems, we decided that at that age we could start seeing problems.

We also took the opportunity to upgrade many of the storage servers we use, these actually hold the web site data and the webservers connect to them. In all we moved over 40 Terabytes of data to new servers and all customer websites are now on servers that are less than six months old.

Although this process was expensive we do believe that keeping hardware up to date is an important part of being a web host and is something that you would want us to do.

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Signup Features
Automated membership registration.
Inputs info into a member’s database and .htpasswd with encrypted passwords for increased security.
.htpasswd passwords are encrypted using DES randomised salt encryption for extra security.
Emails registrant with confirmation details once they’ve registered.
Additional form field for collecting extra information about your users.

Member Features
Account modification facility.
Account removal facility.
Password changing facility.
New password request facility.
userdetails.cgi script that displays a users account details.

Administration Features
List all users facility.
Account removal tool.
Create accounts facility.
Bulk email tool with member’s db data import.
Powerful member’s area statistics system.
All failed administration panel logins are logged.
All configuration is done via the administration panel.

Other Features
Quick and free online support.
Customisable headers and footers for all public parts of the script.
HTML held in external text files.
Separate headers and footers for administration section.
All configuration is done within one simple file.
Randomised DES password encryption for increased security.
Passwords held in member’s database are encrypted for extra security.
Easy customisation of fonts and colours.
Notification facility for administrator so they know when a user removed themselves from the member’s area.
Signup online/offline facility to allow the administrator to close the registration from and stop new signups.
Locked Area Lite is included with almost all our web hosting packages.

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