Google Local Business Center makes it extremely easy for small businesses to get their website into Google’s search results, along with specific and important information about their business. For example, you can specify your hour of operations, your exact location which provides searchers with driving directions, contact information and even customized coupons.

With the all new Google Business Center you now get a wealth of information about your potential customers. You can

1. Find our the exact search term they used to find you
2. Find out where they are located at how far they travelled to you
3. Find out how often your business listing appeared in Google’s search results
4. Find out how many times a customer clicked through to your website for more information on your business

All this information is provided for you on the new Google Business Center dashboard, complete with daily activity for your listings.

Daily summary of activity for your Google Business Center listing

Total Stats for your Business Listing

Check out this promotional video to see how Google Local Business Center can help your business grow.

Note: Google Local Business Center is only for US business right now but will be expanding to more countries shortly.

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Competing for keywords can be very difficult. Often times a keyword you want to rank high for involves competing with thousands, or millions, of other websites. So what if it were possible to find keywords before they became popular? Almost like seeing into the future.

Well you can get some “insight” into what keywords are rising in popularity with Google Insight for Search.

With Google Insight for Search you can find out what your customers are searching for before the keyword term has become popular. You can narrow your search down to specific countries or regions, look across different services such as Google Web search, news search image search, etc… and even narrow your search down by category.

Google Insights for Search will even provide popular synonyms and upcoming search terms that are gaining in popularity.

Try doing a search for one of your keywords within the last 30 days to see what your customers are searching for on Google Insights for Search.

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help search engines find new and changed content faster.

According to their Webmaster Tools Blog and a study conducted on the effectiveness of XML Sitemaps.

Two important points can be taken directly from this study;

We conduct this test over a dataset consisting of over five billion URLs that were seen by both systems. According to the most recent statistics at the time of the writing, 78% of these URLs were seen by Sitemaps first, compared to 22% that were seen through Discovery first.

And more importantly;

The main observation from this study is that for an archival domain, Discovery is 63% “efficient” and Sitemaps is 99% efficient in crawling the domain.

Since creating an XML Sitemap is so easy and effortless, there is no reason not to have one.

No related posts.

Anyways, since they discontinued support for MSN search, SERank will not be able to complete searches when MSN is selected. To get around this problem, do not do a rank check through MSN.

Fortunately we have already addressed this issue for the next update to SERank. We have added Bing support as well as a host of new features and enhancements for version 2.0 of SERank.

You can download a beta version of SERank by creating a free beta tester’s account on TryBeta.

More details on version 2.0 will come shortly, but users who purchase SERank today, will be able to upgrade to version 2.0 for free.

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Some of the highlights of the new interface and new features include;

1. An all new dashboard that shows your most important data including top search queries, top incoming links as well as any errors found on your website which may effect how Google and other searches crawl your website.
2. Up to 100 top search queries for your website and up to 100 top clicked search queries.
3. The ability to track XML Sitemaps submitted by other users of your site.
4. You can now subscribe to messages sent to your Webmaster Tools account so you get them right to your email. You no longer have to login to your account to check your messages

All in all, this new updated offers some much needed new features. We especially like the addition of showing up to 100 search queries. If you haven’t already done so, create your XML Sitemap today and get access to all of this important information about your website.

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What is a decision based search engine?

Unlike Google who ranks websites based on popularity, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine attempts to understand what you are actually looking for. For example, if you were to type “digital camera” into Bing you will see a list of categories on the left hand side. Click the Shopping category to quickly see product reviews, comparisons and price. What’s more, your category selection is remembered so that each time you do a search for a product, you are taken directly to the Shopping category once again.

Bing helps you make decisions on any number of questions you may have. For example, type in “flights from boston to san francisco” and you will be able to quickly see when the best time to travel is, how much a flight would cost and what the best price is. Microsoft has attempted to bring features from dozens of other websites under one easy to use search engine including stocks, shopping, local maps and more.

Optimizing your website for Bing.com

With an estimated $80 million dollar marketing budget Microsoft will no doubt be attracting more and more users to its new search engine. Unlike MSN search and Live search, Bing brings innovation and much needed improvements to the search industry. So how you can you optimize your website for Bing?

Lets first take a quick look at Bing’s search results. Howevering your mouse over a search result in Bing reveals a popup window with a quick preview of the listed page. This isn’t a full web page preview like other search engines may provide. Instead, Bing attempts to grab the most relevant portions of a website so searchers can quickly decide whether or not they would like to visit it.

Bing website description

This means, having the number one spot for a search result may not always provide the most amount of visitors. Here are some tips for optimizing your website for Bing.com;

1. With the new page summary features, ensuring you have enticing content on your page will allow you to be able to attract more visitors from the search results page.
2. Ensuring all of your pages have enough text on them with your targeted keywords. Initial studies show that having larger blocks of text near the top of your page results in better page summaries.
3. Keeping anchor text (text used to link between pages) consistent for important pages so they show up under the ‘Also on this page’ section.
4. Local search results are getting more and more important so be sure to include your address on your website.
5. Create your XML Sitemap file and submit it to Bing Webmaster Tools.

How can RAGE Software’s SEO products help?

Sitemap Automator will work flawlessly with Bing.com to get your website noticed by Bing as well as all other major search engines.

XML Sitemaps created with Sitemap Automator are still the best way to get your website listed in all major search engines.

SERank is being updated as we speak to include support for Bing.com. A new version will be available in the next few days so you can easily track your website’s success in Bing.com’s search results.

Domainer is still an invaluable tool for tracking your domains and websites, finding link partners and discovering how successful your competitor’s website’s are.

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This free update for registered users of Domainer 1.x includes the ability to add custom fields for each domain so you can track and store any kind of information, lets you create smart folders based on custom fields and will once again retrieve RSS subscriber details for blogs.

Domainer is the fully featured domain management tool for Mac OS X, letting you track and manage all of your domains and websites. In addition to providing all administrative details and sinking your domain expiration dates with iCal, Domainer provides all important search engine optimization (SEO) statistics so you can easily gauge the value of any domain.

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It also includes improvements to CSS optimizations and PHP optimizations. It is a free update for registered users of version 1.x.

WebCrusher, for those who have never tried it, is an intelligent website code and image optimizer for Mac OS X. It can significantly reduce the size of HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP and Javascript files without changing the appearance of your site. It can also reduce the size of image files making sure your website loads as fast as possible in any web browser.

Download WebCrusher website optimizer for Mac OS X and make sure your site loads as fast as possible for your visitors and customers!

A fast loading website is also essential for a top ranking website in Google and other search engines.

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Google in particular does not like slow loading websites. In fact, if you are using adwords to promote your site, the speed of your website’s load time is used as a Quality Factor to help determine your cost-per-click and your ad position.

Even more important however, is that your website’s load time will effect how many of your pages Google will index. Take a look at the following graphs taken from Google Webmaster Tools. The bottom graph shows the time spent downloading a page while the middle graph shows the number of kilobytes downloaded per day and the top graph shows the number of pages crawled per day.

You can easily see that as the time spent downloading pages went up Google indexed LESS pages. There is a clear inverse relationship between download time and number of pages indexed.

How do you check your own site?

You can check this for your own site by creating an XML Sitemap file and checking the Crawl Stats in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

How do you fix this?

Fortunately there is a very easy way to fix this. You need to reduce the size of your website and you can easily do this with WebCrusher website optimizer. WebCrusher will instantly optimize your site by removing unneeded website code and compressing image files. Then it can automatically publish your site directly to your webserver whether your are using an actual web host or MobileMe/iDisk to host your site.

In just 5 minutes you can have a faster website, that loads as quickly as possible for your visitors and insures Google and other search engines can properly scan and index all of your webpage files.

You also want to make sure that you are using a fast web hosting service to host your site. If you are a MobileMe/iDisk user it may be time to change to a fast and reliable web hosting service.

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SEO Presentation at Xsilva’s Day Camp

Our week started with an in depth presentation on search engine optimization for Xsilva LightSpeed POS resellers and users. We provided specific search engine optimization strategies and demoed our LightSpeed Web Store SEO Add-ons. The Day Camp presentation took place at the Westin St-Francis hotel.

Exhibiting at Macworld 2009: New SEO Software for Mac OS X

Starting early Tuesday morning we got to speak with hundreds of new and existing customer’s interested in promoting their websites in search engines and learning about our web development software and all new web hosting services for Mac users.

We updated the following software for Macworld 2009:
Sitemap Automator 2.0 which includes a totally redesigned user interface, support for robots.txt file, the ability to report potential indexing errors on your site and the ability to remember the details you have set for each page after re-scanning your website for new content. Sitemap Automator is now the most complete, and fastest way to create and update your XML Sitemaps on any platform.

WebCrusher 1.4 which significantly improves optimizations of cascading style sheets, iWeb based websites and more. Watch for all new, feature packed updates coming soon!

SERank 1.9 includes improved reporting features, new exporting options for importing into Excel or Numbers and a number of bug fixes.

Check out some of the highlights from show;

Macworld After Parties and Sponsorships

Macworld isn’t complete without the after parties. This year, RAGE Software sponsored the popular MacMingle party at Jillian’s restaurant. The party was a tremendous success once again and we were happy to speak with customers and press outside of the busy show floor.

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