There are hyper local directories, as found at www.myweeklysentinel.com’s Business and Classified section and the chamber websites found in the communities in which we live.

In contrast, there are directories such as Google and Bing, the search engine giants that help us find “Italian restaurants near me” and “Lennox furnace service” and “post office”. These are free listing opportunities for your business. “We see clients getting about 10% of their organic (free) website traffic and 15% of their paid search traffic through Bing,” said Phillip Barnhart, director of client marketing services for Nehmedia in Austin, TX. “The organic traffic is anchored by the Bing Places entry.”

In this article I am going to walk you through the registration process for Bing Places, which will put you on the Bing map and in their directory listing.

1.     Open your internet browser and go to www.bingplaces.com. If you have a Microsoft account, use it to sign in. If you don’t have a Microsoft account, sign up for one. You’ll need it to use Bing Places for Business. Once you have logged in, click the “Get Started” button.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization 

"Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as "natural," "organic," or "earned" results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users." from Wikipedia​

Optimization is what technology is all about. So how will a company optimize their online ranking with Google, Bing and Yahoo if they don't know where to start? Often this is left to a third party consulting company as it is a challenging endeavor even for the experienced. To fully appreciate the challenge, read further to learn about the many facets of SEO.

The Short List of SEO Optimizations for Small Businesses

1. Good website design (mobile-friendly and tablet-friendly) and good content.
2. Use Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster to verify and present content to these search engines.
3. Implement social media effectively. Multiple social media channels should be used to assure more eyes see your content and more search power is devoted to your content.
4. Get on the maps - Google and Bing!
5. Subscribe to the free directories of Manta, Yelp, BBB, and all others offered. This provides backlinks to your website and social channels and provides a new audience.

It's hard to stay abreast of the many features of social media. Today I was on my Facebook business page to adjust the settings for the featured YouTube video my audience sees when they click on my YouTube video tab. I ran across PAGE VERIFICATION in the GENERAL section of the SETTINGS options. The note reads "Verified Pages show up higher in search results." 

I immediately clicked on the VERIFY PAGE link and was given the option to provide my business phone number or a business document from a utility company, bank or the like. They confirmed they would not share my business phone number with other, so I provided my business phone number. Facebook called me right away and provided a four digit authorization number for me to key in. Boom! My business page is now verified and will "show up higher in search results".

Blogging is an important component of a small business website. I hope you have given thought to how your audience would benefit from reading your blog of relevant articles featuring videos and photo galleries. Additionally, publishing a blog article on a regular basis is one of the best ways to get your website listed higher in search engine query results.

Our website editor was recently updated to improve the user experience for bloggers and their audience. A NEW feature was added to enable customized labels for the title and description of each blog, assuring that the search engines will display the proper preview information to inquiring minds.

View BTG's short clip on YouTube

Sitemaps exist in two places on a website - a formatted hyper-linked page for the general public to use for quick viewing and navigation within a site, and an un-formatted page for the webcrawlers that reach out to scan the content on a website.

Mapping sounds complicated right? Not really. Our web hosting service automatically updates the sitemap for webcrawlers as you edit your website. It dynamically will add, delete, and change the information to keep it current. You should update your site twice a month (minimum) to keep the webcrawlers on your site. This will improve your search engine ranking. You can see to the left that there are date and time stamps on the links to the web pages for www.thinklaird.com. The search engines are very interested in how current your web page information is, and may skip "stale" pages. The automatic update for the sitemap is an important part of the SEO (search engine optimization) provided by our hosting service.

Tap the "Webcrawler Sitemap" image to link out to see the page.