Since the days of creating my first geotargeted site for Raleigh, NC I’ve struggled with the best sequence of (or ) combination to target. For instance, which of these combinations would capture the largest number of visitors?
• Raleigh Real Estate
• Raleigh NC Real Estate
• Real Estate in Raleigh
• Real Estate in Raleigh, NC
• Raleigh North Carolina Real Estate
Tough call. A few years ago I took a guess and went with a combination of two keywords and tackled it like this:
Raleigh Real Estate in Raleigh, NC.
Well I think that looks a tad spammy so I want to find a better practice that can achieve the same results. So I have been polling family and friends by asking things like “If you were new to the area how would you search in Google to find a place like 518 West?” (Its a local Italian restaurant). Of course my sample size is way small but the response I’ve been getting are all over the board:
• Raleigh Italian Restaurant
• Italian Food Raleigh
• Italian Restaurant in Raleigh
and on, and on, and on. There seemed to be no consensus. So my advice for the best approach is to create multiple pages if possible targetting different variations. If you have enough trust rank and inbound links with varying anchor text you can probably nail two variations on one page.
I also did a few high profile queries like Chicago Accountant and Accountant in Chicago and it seems that the SEOs out there are targetting and nailing more than one term by mixing up the inbound links and displaying several combinations on the page. You’ll also begin to find that Google is getting good at the LSI thing and they can relate North Carolina to NC as seen in this query for Raleigh North Carolina Real Estate where my raleighlist site shows up in the middle of the SERP’s even though the page has no mention of ‘North Carolina’.
If you are SEOing for local geotargetted pages how do you go about it?
After several years of being in the same business in the same city with Andy Beal we finally got together for lunch. Walking through the open office space at Fortune Interactive was a much different experience than some of the other local sourced web (ahem) shops. Instead of a huge bullpen of sales people chattering away on the phones I see employees that appear to be writing content, sending emails, and sending reports (i.e. taking care of the customer). Instead of CTO’s that don’t know a user-agent from a response status code I see Mike Marshall, the brains behind FI’s SEMLogic and whiteboards with scribbling about Latent Semantic Indexing. Good sign for the clients.
While we didn’t have time for a demo (Mike was preparing for a client demo) Andy gave me run down of the technology. SEMLogic does exactly what my private set of tools has done for my business with great success. It captures masses of data from the current successful sites in the major search engines. It then aggregates that data into meaningful reports which enables Andy and crew to spot deficiencies and set targets for their own clients. Feed SEMLogic a keyword and it’ll give you timely, related keywords including LSI keywords ranked by a scoring system. It even goes a step further and groups clusters of exact match and LSA keywords and produces a 3D visualization of these clouds of nodes.
As many of you know I’ve found great success in analyzing and replicating the distribution of varied anchor texts in my competitor’s backlinks. You guessed it. SEMLogic is calculating off page factors as well. I asked Andy if FI will be offering clients link building services and he says yes so they pass that important test Jim. 
I have to say that is one of the most difficult services to provide but is also absolutely necessary if you actually expect to achieve greater targeted traffic for the client and its one service that the big local sourced web companies fails to provide.
Perhaps the most promising hint of the success of this young company is the attention to customer service. Beal tells me that Fortune Interactive has written its own policies such as minimum number of client phone calls per month, weekly reporting, much small customer to representative ratios than those found in other large SEM consulting firms. And the big customers won’t be left with one representative. The bigger the customer, the bigger the team allocated to them to ensure their success.
If Andy can keep Fortune Interactive’s focus on technology and the customer, I’d say the future looks pretty bright for this company.
Much thanks to Jim, Aaron, Todd and Justilien for putting on a great presentation last week at the WeBuildPages SEO PowWow in Troy, NY. A lot of ideas were flowing as well as plenty of brew later that evening. 
Special thanks to Todd for suggesting the tasty curry joint for lunch.
John Scott has announced the keywords for the much argued about SEO contest. What the heck is a V7ndotcom Elursrebmem? Boring. Anyhow the race is on and I have to say that Mike had a great idea in grabbing the first wikipedia entry for V7ndotcom Elursrebmem. I’m afraid hes going to have a hell of a time beating off the spam on that page.
I’m glad this thing is finally on and we don’t have to put up with anymore rambling, whining from John’s good friends.
Here is another reason why I am beginning to loathe Movable Type. It generates static content rather than utilizing mod_rewrite. Unfortunately its also very messy with its static html generation never cleans up after itself.
Case in point:
I recently moved my ‘Black Hat’ category to the top level of categories. It used to be a subcategory of ‘Search Engine Optimization’. Rebuilt the site and checked all the referencing pages and everything looked cool. Nope. It left behind the old directory: /search_engine_optimization/black_hat/ which means that had I not manually deleted it I would end up with two identical pages spiderable by the search engines.
Damn I wish I could find time to migrate to WordPress.
