When it comes to ranking for Sherman Oaks SEO terms, you’re dealing with local search. You won’t have to worry about ranking globally, because most of your prospective clients will be from the area. This reduces the amount of people you are trying to outrank, making your job much easier.

All you have to remember is to keep things simple and don’t try to get too fancy. Many people struggle with their SEO efforts when they aim for amazingly broad terms. Usually, when you’re doing local search, you don’t need to beat out millions of people, you only need to beat out thousands. When you utilize good SEO strategies, your Sherman Oaks SEO efforts will prove exceedingly successful.

Local Search for Sherman Oaks SEO

Here’s the thing about local search: directories often dominate it. This means that there is definite room for growth for local companies, because all directories are just places that gather and regurgitate information. Most directories don’t even usually give people anything beyond phone numbers and addresses. Rarely will they even mention store hours!

When your business has a website and you want to rank locally, you won’t have to work too hard to beat out these directories. This is because the search engines value usefulness to the searchers. Which do you think is more valuable for someone searching for a local hardware store, the hardware store’s own website, or a directory listing that doesn’t even give store hours?

Keyword Research for Sherman Oaks SEO

When you research keywords for your business based in Sherman Oaks, you should start general. For instance, if you sell furniture, that’s a good place to start. However, all companies who are ranking for “furniture” aren’t exactly your competition.

You need to think and research like the end user. What are they going to search? Let’s imagine a typical person in Sherman Oaks; they probably will search for “Sherman Oaks furniture” (granted, probably without the capitalization). This is exactly what you should do!

Your competition isn’t going to be coming from Furniture.com, it’s going to be coming from…well, actually no place really good! As of this writing, there are only directories currently trying to rank for “Sherman Oaks furniture.” And as we know, directories are pretty worthless in the grand scheme of things!

Optimization for Your Sherman Oaks SEO Efforts

Even though you’re going for local search, it doesn’t mean that you can ignore good optimization techniques. Make sure you have good content, keep your content fresh and optimized and you’ll be well on your way to ranking in your Sherman Oaks SEO efforts!

Here’s the thing: Most people don’t want to link out from their website because they’re worried that it’s going to steal their link juice. They’re paranoid that they’re going to lose their precious juice. Oh, my precious. (Yes, obvious Lord of the Rings reference here.) Funny thing with this is that if you don’t link out, how are people going to know about you?

Seriously, are they going to happen upon you from Google randomly? Not bloody likely if you’ve just put up your site…thanks sandbox, you’re the best! You need to link out to sites to get noticed and get on the radar of Google (other search engines too, but Google’s the big beast on the block).

However, you should still be selective with who you link to, don’t just link to anyone. When you’re linking out, you should link to authoritative resource sites — meaning sites beneficial to your users. SEO is, fundamentally, all about the user experience.

Just like how a good report will cite its sources, if you know something will benefit your readers, link out to it! Once you do this, the people who you’ve linked to will see your link, visit your site and see what you’re doing. Worst-case scenario from that is that this person does nothing, no big deal; at least you got another viewer that day. Best-case scenario, this new viewer likes what you’re doing, becomes a loyal reader and maybe even link back to you.

That, my friends, is what link love is all about — you gotta give it to get it.

iProspect, an SEM firm, has just finished a survey that holds some interesting tidbits for the SEO/SEM industry.

The main highlight is that 68% of search engine users typically click results on the first page of search results, compared to 62% in 2006, and 60% in 2004. You read right, 68%!

If that’s not convincing enough to get some good SEO going on your site to rank on the first page of the SERPs, consider that only 8% of search engine users review more than the first three pages prior to clicking on a result.

On the one hand, we have over 2/3 of people clicking on something in the first 10 results and on the other hand, 92% of people will only go three pages deep maximum — if you’re not at least in the top 30 for what your trying to rank, you’re out of luck.

Granted, this just enforces exactly what we’ve been saying at Amodon, you need to have good SEO, good content and great design so that people will come to your site, you’ll rank high and the search engines will take notice.

But we’re not ones to say we told you so…but…well, you know.

Here’s a few other interesting things from the post:

• 49% of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they are looking for change and/or re-launch their search after reviewing just the first page of search results, up from 40% in 2006, and 42% in 2004
• 37% of online users associate appearance at the top of search results with a company’s leadership within its industry or category, up slightly from 35% in 2006 and 33% in 2002

Microsoft clearly means business when it comes to their acquisition of Yahoo!. Steve Ballmer (the Microsoft CEO) threw down the gauntlet in an open letter to Yahoo! where he basically said, “You have three weeks to take the deal before we start talking to your shareholders who will want to take this deal because it will make them money.”

Yahoo!, trying to play coy, responded saying that it’s not that they’re not interested in the deal, it’s just that they think big M should pay more. Right, because they’re sliding stock is really emblematic of a company who can make such lofty demands.

Why do I care though?

If, and when, this deal goes through it’ll shift the whole SEO/SEM industry because it’ll go from one where Google dominates all and Microsoft and Yahoo! are distantly nipping at its heels to one where suddenly Microsoft is much closer to Google. This will dramatically change the Internet landscape.

Honestly, I’m excited for when this happens. It’ll be an exciting two horse race with more fun for everyone online.

From an official Google document:

When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? If the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.

That pretty much sums up good websites right there. If you don’t bring something unique to the table, then why are you even there?

People are only going to look at your site if it is new and/or creative and/or informative and/or fun. There is such a proliferation of worthless, crappy and boring websites that it’s not even funny. Net travelers these days are looking for something new, fun and informative.

I promise there are sites out there that have the same basic premise as yours, but you have something they don’t: yourself. Utilize this x-factor.

People don’t watch news stations because they cover vastly different news, there’s only so much that happens in the world at a time. They watch specific news teams because of who is on the team.

They might like how they report, their take on the news or (heaven forbid) how they look (I mean, we’re all people right ). You just can’t take any shortcuts with your site. Add some uniqueness to it. Add some pizzazz. Inject your personality on there, keep it from feeling stuffy and you won’t ever have to worry about what Google says about spammy content.

You know why? Because you won’t have spammy content!

Get out there, exploit your strengths, have some fun and guess what? You’re gonna be a success.