We know positive reviews help local businesses by acting as recommendations or referrals for internet users considering purchasing a product or service. The more positive reviews a business gets, the easier it becomes for search engines to notice that business and consider it a relevant search result for users (consumers). Click on this link to read up on how reviews effect your marketing strategy. The post also discusses the impact fake reviews made by a competitor in the moving industry had on a number of moving companies. Read up on that story here.

Search engines like accurate, thorough content and they like fresh content. Beyond meta data, the more indicators that point to your business (outside links, reviews, “likes”, tweets, regularly updated content) the more important and valid search engines consider you to be and therefore the more likely you will have a strong internet presence in organic search. So vehicles like your website, blog and social media where you can endlessly update your site and/or profiles as often as possible are a great way to reach potential customers vis a vis search engine results and customers directly if they keep up with your sites on their own.

All that being said, you can see how Twitter plays an important role in “talking” to the search engines. It’s a place where new content appears in real time. The more, the merrier! Check out this blog post that walks you through the steps of a basic Twitter strategy for your business. Recently, an app called Breath Bird for Twitter was released for people who cannot use their fingers and who have problems speaking. I haven’t used it but I think the concept is great and there should probably be more apps created for handicapped people. Learn more about the app here.

At Outrank.com, we believe that to understand how to properly optimize a site, you must understand the engines for which you are optimizing.

Search engines scan (or “crawl”) websites on a regular basis to evaluate how they fit within their index of pages. As previously mentioned, search engines then use an algorithm to figure out which pages to display on their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for a given keyword.

Google, the undisputed champion of the search engines, is largely based on a patented “PageRank” algorithm. Fundamentally, PageRank assigns value to a website based on the popularity, trustworthiness and intent of the pages linking to it. It is said that updates are made on a daily basis to the way search engines process results, but certain best practices have evolved that have held true for many years:

1. A page should not present obstacles to the crawling process, which is carried out by search engine spiders. A webpage’s architecture has to be cleanly designed, with an easily followed link structure that is user-friendly and not misleading.
2. Websites should have organic link networks that are created through legitimate and relevant in-bound links. A link to a remodeling site will have greater weight coming from a related site (a general contractor directory) than from an unrelated site (an online farm supply store).
3. Sites that mislead search engine spiders by showing web surfers different content are engaged in cloaking, a practice that will eventually get your website banned from search engine indices.

While the PageRank algorithm has changed, and even been devalued by Google to an extent, its premise is still central to the way search results are filtered. PageRank will continue to be an important piece of Google’s ranking formula, so it’s wise to optimize accordingly.  Read more Outrank.com blog posts on our product blog: http://outrankcom.com/.