The web has been evolving for sometime now. The implementation of different kids of ‘feeds’ is commonplace. You might have a flickr feed that streams to your website or have your RSS feed linked directly to your site, maybe even twitter streams off site via the Twitter API. Having feeds run through your site allows search engines to see that your page is being updated whenever you update the feed. This is just one of many ways in which a feed from an off site can help your search engine ranking.

Having an off-site feed stacked with relevant content that links back to you and and your organization can pay off huge. For instance, David Mihm has the system down perfect. By having the Google getFeed API, David has managed to stream three important off site feeds directly into his website. In those feeds he writes articles about how to improve search engine optimization and search engine ranking.

The idea behind a feed is to show the world that you have a lot of knowledge about what it is that you do. If I were a baker, my feeds could consist of recipes, ingredients, and foods. By streaming a feed into your site you give your audience more opportunities to not only experience what it is that you have to offer but to become part of your ever growing web of influence.

Now you might ask, isn’t that what I have my blog for?

You are absolutely right. However a few off-site feeds might be able to increase your ranking because major search engines will see that off-site traffic, which is relevant to your business, is linking back to your site. It’s really just that simple.

Recently there has been a movement in the web community to SEO their clients sites for Google Maps local business center. The local business center is a list of 10 business names, sorted by search criteria, at the top of a Google search result. Getting to the top of this list is a long and hard road. This list represents the top ten businesses in a geographical area based on a viewer’s search criteria.

Ways to Improve Local SEO

Begin Your Listing ~ Its very easy. Just log into the Google Local Business Center with your own personal ID and password and fill out the form.

Relevant Title ~ Try to get a relevant title in your Google Local Business Center listing. For instance, when listing my business I entered it as ‘Unleashed – Portland Web Design and Development’.

Geo Meta Tags ~ Add Some Geo Tags to your site. This allows Google Maps to further pinpoint your business geographically.
You can read up on Geo Tags so you can understand where to put them and what information to put in them.

Complete the Listing ~ When you’re filling out the information in the Google Local Business Center, make sure you mention some of the benefits of dealing with your business. These fields are meant for customers to learn a little something about your business. For instance, I mentioned my hourly rate, whether or not there was parking available, and a little something about web design.

There are similar local business solutions on Bing! and Yahoo! Following these steps should help increase your online visibility and drive more local searchers to your business, shop, or office.

I’ve just finished writing this wonderful article about HTML5 (which will not be entirely support until 2021) and I realized that technology moves waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fast. However, communication between people and various contents was sped up with the beginning of the ‘word-wide-web’, so its up to us as developers to stay ahead of the curve.

I think there are some really great new applications for web and web browsing (both on and off-line) to warrant a gradual shift to a new web standard. Although, most of us don’t really have the time to stay ahead of the constantly moving curve.

So stay sharp developers, search engine optimizers, and designers, the future has arrived and we have to make the time to keep up with it.