Dell is right on the money with this analysis.  Any business without a website today is like a business without a telephone 30 years ago.  Today people expect all businesses to have a website.   Typically they may use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to find a company when seeking information about the products and services that local businesses offer.

If you have a web designer that is knowledgeable of  (SEO) Search Engine Optimization and adding your business to local search maps you can increase your business exposure to customers that have never heard of you.

For most people searching for a company and services this is often their first stop in seeking information about products and services offered by you.  If they don’t find a website they may well choose another company.

Bad Dog Web Design offers an affordable small to medium business solution for any budget.  Contact us today for your free quote 302-540-8073 or quote@baddogwebdesign.com

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The best thing about adding your site information to Google is that it’s absolutely free.

Google Maps listing show up at the top of the page increasing the traffic flow to your site by moving other organic listings down the page somewhat on Google.

The image below shows the results returned for Delaware Web Design.

Google map results

You can sign up here, add your listing (if it’s already listed you can claim it). Enter your company details, including your address, telephone, description, opening hours, payment terms and a few other things. Remember, the details, description and category of your business will be how people find you.
You can also add accompanying relevant images and video that can be hosted on www.youtube.com.

You can enter the categories associated with your business, if Google’s suggestion don’t fit your business then you enter your own.

You’ll have to verify your listing either by mail, txt or phone using a pin number that Google supplies.

That’s all there is to it.  Within a week or so you might be sitting  at the top of Google for a number of different local searches.

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Backlinks, or ‘incoming links’ are a critical part of your website’s ongoing visibility in search engine results. If you couple this with quality incoming links, you’ll likely see benefit (increased traffic) from people clicking as well.

The game has changed over the recent years. Now, you see the fast emergence of the “social web”, and new tactics such as social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, social news has to be learned. Still, reliance on traditional marketing and public relations is a must, more than ever.

To become and continue to be a leading website, more thought and care must go into developing ‘link bait’ – quality content, tools, widgets and similar – that may receive faster/better links from other websites back to you, with less ongoing work – links just keep coming!

Creating content is not enough – you must promote and drive users back to your site from many channels, which can include PPC (Pay Per Click), for example. Running a quick campaign using Paid Search to send visitors to your content bait is one of the creative ways to build awareness and traffic. Think about your target audience before starting any of this.

Things To Remember When Link Building:

1) Rich Keyword Use – in the anchor text. This is the recognized “blue underline” link that points back to you. Get keywords in there!

2) Trust and Authority – incoming links from other significant sites – to send powerful ‘link juice’ and to help elevate your site as another professional, trusted site amongst users and search engines.

3) Natural Link Acquisition – no massive, short and spiked build up of links, no bad link neighborhoods, but a carefully distributed effort amongst varied IP#’s – to show breadth of sites. No black hat approaches or spamming. Also, remember that sites that have more trust and years established online, can get away with more than newer sites.

Manually searching for these authority sites can take time, but professionals do it all the time. Since relevancy is key, try to stick within your marketplace, but don’t over-analyze either, mix it up.

You can submit to directories, use article marketing, and locate blogs for a wider distribution, and I recommend picking a few strategies to start. Don’t try to do too much, too fast.

Some Tools and Ideas:

a. Keyword link search builder – Linksearch – type in a keyword, and it will build Google search strings to speed up the processs.

b. Directories – you should consider Yahoo Directory, Business.com (B2B), Botw.org, Goguides and JoeAnt to start. If you find 20-40 directories of higher quality and related to your niche, that’s good. Try dmoz.org as well, but it will take a while. To find more, use ISEDB.

c. Social Media Sites. The ‘link juice’ is often excluded on sites in this marketplace, but can garner secondary links and certainly visibility and traffic for your brand. Look into Delicious, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn (B2B), Twitter to start.

Quality of links are important, and you should check to make sure links don’t have a “rel=nofollow”, robots.txt exclusion, or javascript redirect code applied. Check also the Google “cache” date – to make sure the page has been recently included, and spidered regularly. As a general guideline – anything page older than 30 days or more is less quality.

These simple tactics and steps should get you thinking about how you must change your link building game for 2009.

Article By Jon Rognerud.

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My first thought was “This must be a shady business”. Secondly I had to read the article.

I thought the write up on the Rip off Report website was actually going to give me some insight on the business I was going to deal with. Instead it was the opinion of ONE disgruntled person that was obviously off their meds.

After reading the article I decided to do a separate search “Is Rip off Report a reliable resource” you’ll find the only web resource saying that Rip off Report is reputable is Rip off Report.

Most of the content for Rip off Report outside of their own site is people trying to get fraudulent claims removed. I found it amazing that it was next to impossible to get things removed from the Rip off Report website.

So now I’m fairly amused and always looking out for the little guy so I decided to do another search “how to get something removed from rip off report”. I thought this might get me some answers from the Rip off Report website on how to get things removed from their website but there was nothing on their website about how to get something removed.

Instead I find websites discussing how Rip off Report is killing the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world on the web. I really don’t want to get too deep in this discussion only because Google was mentioned.

I believe the best resource to find out the real truth about a business is the Better Business Bureau WWW.BBB.ORG

I genuinely hope the people that visit the Rip off Report website take it for what it is. It’s entertainment, much like wrestling on the television.

The way I see it is Rip off Report allows someone the avenue to talk about someone without any authentication process. Someone can have a bad day, post an article and cost a business a fortune.

You can read the articles for yourself.

http://www.97thfloor.com/blog/public-spam-report-google-your-honeymoon-with-rip-off-report-has-to-stop/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/chris-bennet-on-rip-off-report

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/01/ripoff-report-ripping-off-those-reported.html

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/03/rip-off-report.html

http://www.my3cents.com/showReview.cgi?id=37131

http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/reputation/join-in-and-do-your-bit-to-get-rid-of-ripoffreport-from-the-serps/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-wont-remove-that-page-you-dont-like-but-you-or-your-seo-can

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