1. Your Site’s Contact Page

   • First of all – have a contact page!  Title it “Contact” as is the convention around the web, and name it something like “contact.html” or “contact-my-company.php.”
   • Include a full address including city, state, and zip code within the locale that you’re targeting.
   • Include a local phone number, i.e. – make sure the area code matches the the targeted location’s.
   • Have multiple locations?  If you run a multi-national corporation, why not hire an SEO company to rank your locations because it gets a little tricky and is outside the scope of this post.

2. Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Your URL

   • Use a hCard in your website’s head section.  Learn here, create here. Simply use it as the markup/HTML for that part of your contact page.
   • City/State in Contact Page Title Tag
   • City/State in Index Page Title Tag
   • Location in URL (Ex. – AthensGAWebDesigners.com)

3. Your Local Business Profile

   • 1st, go to Google’s Local Business, and claim your business’s profile if you haven’t yet.
   • Profile using local phone number (area code matching the target location)
   • Location in Profile Title
   • Service/Product in Business Category Fields

4. Customer/Client Reviews

   • Customer Reviews are Important!
   • And it’s not just the reviews on Google Maps itself -
   • Google feeds it’s listings with dozens if not hundreds other third party review sites.  For example: Kudzu.com, Yelp, InsiderPages, and many industry specific review services.

5. Pitfalls & What not to do

   • Don’t List a 1-800 number on your profile or on your contact page, I know it makes no sense.  Have one, get your web guys to use an image to display it.
   • Negative Reviews – I know they’re hard to stop, but if you can contact the reviewer & ask them to remove it – do it.
   • Don’t use multiple Business Profiles with:
     1. The same business name
     2. The same phone number
     3. The same address (this one is particularly detrimental)

First, why SEO over other marketing such as PPC?

Pay-per-click advertising is all very well, but it means you have to pay for every visitor. SEO is about getting free traffic from the search engines. Over the course of two years or more, nothing has a better return on investment than SEO. Thus, if you plan on having a website that runs for more than two years, search engine optimization should be a key part of your online marketing strategy.

So what is the worst SEO mistake that a company can make?

The most common mistake that organizations make with regard to SEO is bringing their SEO consultants into the process too late. Many companies fail to give SEO its due consideration during a website’s design phase.

So there you have it, from one of the godfathers of search engine marketing.

Brandt goes on to list several key aspects to a successful SEO campaign that need attention during the design process, or what we like to call “On Page SEO.” Some crucial SEO techniques your design might forget are:

• Search Engine Friendly URLS
  www.abc.com/your-keyword.html vs. www.abc.com/page1.html
• Text Based Navigation Links
• Use of CSS instead of Javascript or Flash

For more in depth info. on the why a SEO consultant should be contacted during a website’s design phase, check out the whole article or give us a call for an informative chat.

But as primarily a SEO firm, we’ve been steering clients away from flash based websites for years due to the fact that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN couldn’t index their content. By content, I mean written text, images, and of course links among other website elements.

It appears the Game is Changing Once Again

Google announced that it has made vast improvements in crawling and indexing flash based content from menus to entire sites:

“In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.”

- From the Official Google Blog

At present, Google is only able to index textual content in flash designs, but this is a vast improvement. More information on Google’s new functionality can be found at Google’s Webmaster Central.

Great, now I can have a beautiful flash based and rank it well too, right?

Not so fast. Hopefully this dream is not too distant in the future, but at present little is known about how effective conventional SEO strategies mesh with the new update to Google’s algorithm. Besides, without Yahoo! and MSN Live making similar announcements, website owners could be losing out as much as 30-40% of their search traffic.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads
   Google Adsense is the grandaddy, but Yahoo and Microsoft offer PPC programs as well. Pay Per Click advertising works by displaying contextually relevant ads on your site, and allowing advertisers to bid on keywords. Once a visitor clicks on an ad on your website or blog, you get a percentage of the earnings.
2. Direct Placement
   A simple advertise here link or button where the ad will be placed can do the job.  This can be easy as an agreed dollar amount per month, or more complex such as setting up an ad-server to track impressions and click-throughs.
3. Sponsored Posts or Reviews
   Yes, you can paid to review products and services on your website or blog. Disclosure and ethics are a topic for another day, but if you’re interested check out: PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews
4. Text Link Ads
   Surprisingly, text link ads can be a big money maker due to their value in search engine optimization. And it’s really simple to do, just insert a link into an article, page, or and get a monthly fee.  See TextLinkAds and LinkWorth
5. Sell Products
   You can now sell products through your website that you never have to see, touch, or ship.  You don’t even have to handle credit cards.  Popular setups include selling some of Amazon.com’s millions of products through an Astore (do a search on fishing lures, there are tons of them), or selling everything from hunting or fishing related T-shirts, coffee cups, and mouse pads from CafePress.com
6. Affiliate Programs
   Affiliate programs work by you placing affiliate links or ads on your site.  If a visitor clicks on the ad and ends up buying something, you get a commission on the sale.  There are many, many general affiliate programs out there, but here are some Outdoor Industry related programs:
   - BassPro Shops
   - Cabelas
   - Associate Programs (Outdoors)
   - LandBigFish.com
7. Donations
   Doing good work, or have something really worth reading?  Simply create a paypal donations button.  Remember – if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
8. Newsletters
   Got a newsletter with a good circulation?  Add a sidebar or banner advertising for fishing or hunting related products.  Get advertisers by sticking an “advertise here” link on your sign up page or in the newsletter itself.

How much $$$?

Traffic amounts and the competitiveness of your site’s niche will largely dictate whether you’re making beer money or enough for a new boat.  But remember, there’s nothing wrong with beer money…

While diagnosing and fixing problems may or may not be easy, discovering a problem is very easy.

Enter BrowserShots.org to the rescue. BrowserShots allows you to check your web site’s appearance on literally dozens of browser and operating systems for free. You can then either view or download JPG images of how your site lays out in all of them. It usually takes 15-30 minutes to load them, but you can go do something else while it loads.

An example of AmericanVagabondPhotography.com in the Netscape Navigator browser on a Ubuntu Linux operating system. It’s not important that I don’t know what either of those are, what’s important is the site looks clean in whatever they are….

First, because many of these sites come up in major search engines for a variety of phrases, which can lead potential clients to your website. Second, it can help build your search engine rankings by giving you high quality, relevant inbound links to your charter or guide website. Most are free, and some require you to link back to their site from yours (reciprocal linking), but all offer web links as well as contact info pointed towards your business.

Here’s a list of 15 17 (*see below*) websites offering free services to post fishing reports on the web. Remember, you can post last week’s report to them all if you like.

***UPDATE: Thanks to the great response, we will be continually updating this list***

If you have or know of any other fishing report sites, please comment below and we’ll make sure they are added.

1. Big Fish Tackle
2. Best Game Fishing Directory
3. Fishing Reporters
4. Sportfishermen.com
5. ReelReports.com
6. Ultimate Bass Forum
7. ReelFishingReports.com
8. 2CoolFishing.com Message Boards
9. CyberAngler.com
10. Fish Eye Soup
11. FishingWorks.com
12. FishyFishing.com
13. LandBigFish.com
14. TheFishFinder.com
15. TheFishingGuide.com
16. US Angler
17. Waders On
18. Fishing Reports at Fintalk.com
19. Fox Lake Fishing
20. GoFishingForums.net