GoLocalSeo

Let’s be frank: tons of people steal content from other people’s sites for their own content. The most common of these is bloggers copying and pasting newspaper articles for their blogs. Many people think that if it’s on the Internet, then it’s up for grabs. Would that it were true, all our lives would be easier. But to put it bluntly, it’s plagiarism. The good news is that anything copyrighted before 1923 is yours. The bad news is that that stuff that old probably isn’t worth anything.

But let’s get this into scope. A copyright is legal protection of a document someone has created. In the old days you had to send a copy of the document to the copyright office, but these days simply by virtue of posting something on the Internet–your blog for instance–the document is automatically copyrighted. You do have to mark the content as copyrights, however. All of this is protected by the Berne Convention. If you use someone else’s content, they can take you to court, or at least make things difficult for you. All this means is that your content is protected by the same laws as everyone else. Isn’t that reassuring?

But there is a practical, SEO reason for not copying content. If you use someone else’s content, the search engines will see duplicate content and it will hurt their search engine results. The inverse of that is that you will never rise as far up the search engine rankings as you might if you created your own quality content.

So it’s not just a matter of morality, it’s better for you too.

Maximizing your website or blog with all the technical aspects of SEO is absolutely necessary. Including choosing the right keywords with out too much competition amongst other sites and putting them in the meta sections of pages.
Creating a good landing page with an appealing design is also important. But, more important than all of this should be the quality of your content. Your site is basically worthless if the content isn’t useful to anyone or easily readable. The key to writing good content is writing about something that a lot of people could use. A good place to start would be writing up several “how to” or “D-I-Y” style articles on various subjects. So many people go online to search for free information and DIY articles. Anything ranging from how to change your oil to renovating your home.
This can be done really well if you target your articles and content to your community. Local SEO simply requires that you take your neighbors and city into consideration when you type your words.
Need help coming up with something to write about? Our staff has several years of content writing and can assist you with any questions you may have. Go ahead and leave a comment or email us direct with your questions.

Submission to a search engine is fine, but getting links from other sites to yours is the best way to guarantee search engine results. This process is known as backlinking and is crucial to SEO.

The best way to understand backlinking is like this:

Someone that owns another website stumbles upon yours. The site owner happens to like what you’ve written, a product you might sell or a service that you offer within your local community. Whatever it might be, it’s created enough interest that the site owner decided to place a link on their site to yours so they can share what they found with their readers. When that site is crawled by search engine spiders your link will be discovered. This in turn will that piece of content up in the rankings, along with your site, and will appear when people search using the keywords associated with your linked content. The more inbound links you have, the better you’ll rank.

There are a number of ways you can create backlinks.

You can create your own backlinks by posting on message boards (also known as discussion groups). This is a bit of a dated process and only effective if you post to a board that is relevant to your site. In other words, posting to a board that is based on horses won’t do you much good if your site deals with haberdashery. Like everything else in search engine optimization, it needs to be quality and target driven content. It should also be noted that most boards nowadays will not let you add links or signatures.

Link trading is also reasonably popular, but also a bit dated. This involves site owners swapping links with one another. While sometimes helpful the time can better be spent working on writing and submitting articles, posts, etc.

Blogs can be a great sources for creating backlinks. However, the same rules from above apply here as well. With the blogosphere as big as it is, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a few that interest you. If your goal is to optimize your site locally, do as such and join some community blogs. Leave comments, contribute to the discussion and make yourself known - in a good way of course.

Contributing articles to Social Media sites like Digg, Reddit and others are an awesome way to get lots of attention fast. The only drawback is that from a local optimization perspective, you generally won’t be reaching your target audience.

Writing and submitting content to article databases is a great approach as well. There are several like ezinearticles.com that allow you to author content on subjects that you are most familiar with. They in turn publish the content on their site. These sites get tons of traffic and appear frequently in most search engine result pages (SERP’s). All authors are given credit at the bottom of the article allowing you to add a brief bio and link. Keep the content focused and try to keep it at least regionally targeted and you’ll see benefits in the form of traffic to your site. An example of this could be something like “The Boise Economy - Is it Time to Start Your Business?” Hopefully you get the idea.

The supreme way of building backlinks of course is by having freshly updated content on your site. Once people discover your site and your voice they will start coming to you, linking to you and hopefully buying from you!

Of course the hardest part is sitting down and writing all of this - not an easy task at all and is really a job unto itself. If you need help with your content writing including editing, original content, article submission and more - let us know. We’ll gladly assist you in any way we can.