What are the best practices for Local SEO?

These Local SEO Best Practices Guide are for businesses who want to list their business in google local 3-Pack or stick to top listing. You’ll find this guide strenuous but ensure your local business placement in Google’s Local Search Result.

Depending on how your business website and google my business page is set-up and optimized, you might not be able to implement all of these tactics, but implementing even 70% of them is enough for most local businesses to rank in the Google Local Pack.

A Professional Local SEO Strategy, Covers how to create, verify and optimize google+ local page, local business website on page seo, citations, reviews, local content creation idea, local link opportunities, and testing.

1. Create, verify and Optimize your Google+ Local page
2. Optimize Your Website for Your Business
3. Get Local Business Listings (Citations)
4. Get Reviews on your Google+ Local page and on 3rd party websites
5. Create and Share Local Content
6. Find Local Link Opportunities
7. Constantly Test & Optimize

Tactic #1: Create, verify and Optimize your Google+ Local Page

Google+ Local Page is your direct connection to your customers, whether they’re searching for your business through Google Search, Maps or Google+.

Google+ Local Page dominate in local search results and your competitors are already there, so we want you there too. A verified and optimized Local Business Pageintegrates your online business presence to one easy place. Follow this steps to create and optimize your Google+ Local Page:

• Create, verify or consolidate your Business listings from Google My Business.
• Select your business category carefully, The Business Category you choose for your listing is now showing in 3-pac right below your business title.
• Use a real physical address and a local phone number, not an 800 number.
• Put as much business information as you can including images and video as required to achieve 100% completion rating.

Tactic #2: Optimize Your Website for Your Business

An optimized business website helps search engines identify and rank businesses by their geographical location in relation to a search query. This is not overly difficult, but many local business owners tend to overlook it as it require a great effort. Website Page Signalshas 21.0% impact in local search as per Moz research.

This Local business website optimization checklist for local business will help your business rank in google 3-pack as well as increase your website organic ranking and traffic. The following optimization techniques will ensure that your website is properly optimized for Google Local Search Results.

• Include your business NAP in prominent place.
• Give your pages geo-specific, descriptive meta tags (meta title and description) including your zip/postal code.
• Make sure you have contact information, including your NAP, in text on every page of your site.
• Embed google map and driving direction on your website.
• Add your location to your image alt text.
• Add Schema markup in your website where possible.

Tactic #3: Get Local Business Listings (Citations)

Local Business Listings are defined as mentions of your business’s name, address and phone number (aka NAP) on other webpages — even if there is no link point to your website. An example of a citation might be an online local business directory where your business is listed, but not linked to your website.

When it come to Local Map Ranking, Local Business Listings (Aka Citations) are a key component of the ranking algorithms in Google and Bing Local Search. According to Moz 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors, Citation is the 3rd biggest ranking signal and make up 15.5% of the overall ranking factors.

Citation volume and the number of other business listings referencing your business location(s) are important in google local 3-pack; however, consistency and accuracy will always take precedence over volume. Here’s a list compiled by Hubspot of the 50 local business directories to submit your business

Tactic #4: Get Reviews on your Google+ Local page and on 3rd party websites

Reviews are one of the major ranking perspective in your local rankings in Google and elsewhere, and they’re one of the very important factors (It hold 9.8% weight in local search) in getting customers to choose you over your competitor.

This is truly important that your business have some positive reviews on Google+ Local page and on other popular third-party sites. When your consumer want to read reviews, they usually visit Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp, CitySearch, Insider Pages, MerchantCircle, TripAdvisor, Better Business Bureau (BBB), Foursquare, Manta, and Angie’s List.

Tactic #5: Create and Share Local Content

Create local content relevant to your business and the city you live in and share with the world via your website and social media. For example, you can write about an past local event where you participated or an upcoming event you’re going to participating.

There’s endless opportunities when you use creative thinking about the events and businesses in your area of town. Just don’t forget to include images, videos and link to the event site (If there’s any website dedicated to that event). Want more Local Content Creation Idea, read Mike Ramsey Strategy.

Tactic #6: Find Local Link Opportunities

Moz found Link is the second important factor and has 18.3% impact in local search results. Links from local websites that point to your website impacts your sites ability to rank in 3-pack and make your website “authority” locally.

There are many ways to acquire local links like Sponsor a meetup group, Host a community event, donate to a local club or organization, from local newspaper site, etc. You can find an Interesting Local Link Building Guide from Casey Meraz Post on Moz.

Tactic #7: Constantly Test & Optimize

The previous six tactic that we have just discussed need to be constantly addressed. To dominate in Google Local 3-Pack you need to always be one step ahead of your competitors. There is always room for improvement, so don’t be afraid to test and make changes. You would be surprised at how the smallest change can often result in the biggest change. What do you think?

What are the top skills every Web Developer should have?

1. Pulse on the Industry and the User
   It's impossible to know where web development will go in 5 years, but those who follow standards bodies or at least read tech blogs have a much better understanding of upcoming changes and growing trends.
   
   It's not enough to follow the industry. Web developers must also understand their users and how they use the product. Analytics tools like StatCounter and Google Analytics are my favorites for gathering basic metrics of user interactions. A web developer should know if a third of the traffic is from a mobile device or that visitors are from Spanish-speaking countries. Maybe it's time to think about optimizing for mobile and internationalization.
   
   I list this as the number one skill because being proficient here will trickle down and facilitate the other skills.
   
   Things are changing and a lot has already changed. HTML 5, CSS 3, ECMAScript 5, and so on. If you can see these things coming, you will be able to adjust your priorities.
   
   Developers must have an understanding of the state of the browser market and to some extent even the OS market. Did you know users of Windows XP are unable to upgrade to IE 9? Want to guess what the most popular operating system is? (hint: it's XP). Knowing this, do you think it's a good idea to drop support of IE 8, even though 9 is out? Maybe for your user base, that could be a good idea. But my point is that you should know where all of the pieces are on the board before you make your move.
   
2. Programming Competency
   Web developers must be able to code. This is supposed to sound obvious. An effective web developer must be able to write syntactically valid HTML, CSS, and even JavaScript.
   
3. Testing
   All web developers must be able to test their code in multiple browsers. It's easy to test for our own personal browser of choice and ignore the rest, but the web is about diversity and the browser landscape is very diverse.
   
   JavaScript testing also falls under this category. Developers must use tools to detect and debug scripting errors. Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer all come with built-in developer tools that allow you to step through JavaScript and execute code in an interactive console. Firefox has limited native support for this, but the Firebug plugin is the de facto standard.
   
   If you are going to write code, you must be prepared to make sure that it works.
   
4. Accessibility
   Developers must be able to write code that is flexible enough to be used in different ways. Search engines and screen readers for the blind are two examples of machines interpreting your code. Sites that are heavy with Flash or foreground images for UI tend to struggle here.
   
   Accessibility at it's core is really about usability. Can the user use your product? Web developers must know about any obstacles between the user and the product to better design it. Is the product usable on small screens like mobile devices or even older monitors? Do users know to click on a particular button to continue to the next page or is the page difficult to understand?
   
   How about users with images, cookies, or JavaScript disabled? What if they're just using a really old version of a browser? What do you do for them?
   
   Know your user, set limits to what you will and will not support, implement a cross-compatible solution, and test thoroughly.
   
5. Security
   I leave security for last, but really it's a top priority. Every web developer must understand how malicious people can use their product to attack the site or other even other users.
   
   If the web developer has skill #1, they should be familiar with the security concerns of the industry and common defenses.

What will be the biggest web design trends of 2016?

1. Devices
Actually, Google Glass has turned out to be a mistake on Google’s part. It sounded great on paper, but once put on the market, those who could afford it found it to be rather annoying. Sales of Google Glass were initially slower than expected and dropped off, rather than increasing over time.

I predict the iWatch will sell fairly well at first, owing to all the fanboys and fangirls who have too much money to blow and feel the need to own all things Apple. After the first few days, in other words, once the Applephiles have spent their time waiting in line and have bought the iWatch, sales will drop off dramatically. People will begin to realize that the watch is too big as a wearable and that the viewport is too small for anything more than telling time. The initial start screen will be too crowded with icons for it to work well as a touch screen device, but does not lend itself to using a mouse and keyboard like non-touch devices.

2. Accessibility
At the same time, UX Design and Web Design will remain at odds on accessibility issues. Many cutting edge Web Designers will continue the shift towards adding more eye candy as the majority of content, making websites and apps even less friendly towards blind, deaf, and elderly users. Gesture only sites and apps will make UI elements even less friendly towards physically disabled users, especially those missing fingers or an arm (or the ability to fully control finger and arm movements, like in the case of Stephen Hawking). Devices controlled through eye tracking and apps designed for those devices will add another obstacle for blind users. Web Designers will continue to ignore accessibility (beyond forced giant fonts for everyone) and will leave the brunt of the work to the engineers creating new prosthetics and implants for the disabled.

At the same time, the best of UX Designers, especially UX Designers that have worked with or lived will disabled people, will continue to push for simple design fixes for the disabled. We will continue to recommend use of text for menus, whether the text is visible on the screen or it is ‘visible’ to screen readers for the blind as alt-text added as an attribute to the img element for menu icons.

3. Parallax and animations
Parallax and heavy video-based animations will likely win out over CSS transitions and minimal JS/SVG solutions. This will continue to increase load times for the purpose of eye-candy instead of decreasing load times for the purpose of keeping up with our fast-paced, modern lifestyles. In rural areas, many of these parallax and video-animation apps and websites coupled with low bandwidth will cause an increasing number of sites and apps to simply time out, meaning the user will not be able to access the sites and apps at all. Even parallax scrolling adds little to the user’s experience relative to the unpleasantness of slower load times and heavily scripted code spaghetti. Using a HTML and CSS solution involving the use of fixed and relative positioning, scrolling overflow, calc() height and width, and @media queries and/or @viewport for viewport size adds to the user’s experience just as much as parallax scrolling, while making the layout more responsive, keeping the code elegant, and adding little or nothing to load times. The only real reason to stick with parallax scrolling is the code-illiteracy of drag-and-drop CMS-only designers.

4. Flexbox
Flexbox has been predicted to become a thing for quite some time, but has yet to gain the traction in the market that it needs to actually get much of anywhere. I think part of the reason flexbox is not taking off as hoped, is the fact that it began as an Adobe project. The W3C initially blew it off, knowing what flexbox could become. Flexbox still has the potential of becoming a fully Adobe owned bunch of proprietary markup which Adobe could charge high usage and licencing fees for. At the same time, it was created and is still used for the purpose of making HTML and XML related sites look and function the same as PDF files. We have done the printed magazine before. Those who look for long term trends want to find ways to surpass current Print Design. Those who are fixated on short term trends continue to look to digitally reinvent the printing press (invented in 1436, revolutionizing printing technology by the early 1500's).

5. Grid layouts
While useful for some content, grids tend to be over-used. Not all content lends itself to a grid. On the other hand, when a grid layout does benefit users, many grid designs make heavy use of massive scrips and bad semantics (div.column3row5text for example). Often JS, PHP, and other programming languages end up being used to create the design, while CSS is ignored or used to create function, which is completely backwards from how these coding languages are meant to be used. The thing is, grids are a bit like tables in that they can arrange content in a grid pattern using three elements. In the case of tables, table, tr, and td are three elements. In the case of a responsive grid, the three elements may be anything.

Using [div, section, article] or [menu, ul, li] are both perfectly valid examples of using three elements to create a grid layout. The trick is in using positioning and display attributes to your advantage and using @media queries for responsiveness and calc() for the height and width of the actual tiles. Simplifying the markup and styling this way makes it that much simpler to design a grid that does not absolutely have to mimic the Metro design of Windows 8 (aka flat design).

6. Flat design vs. so-called skeuomorphic design
Once upon a time, textures and shading were all the rage. Then high resolution photography and parallax scrolling became a thing. Now, flat design (rather late considering the inspiration, Windows sort-of-newish Metro design) is the new trend and design is becoming increasingly ‘anti-skeuomorph’. Modern design is more visual and anti-visual, all in one. ‘Skeuomorphic design’ is the new devil with an oh-so-intellectual sounding name. Big words, people, big words.

But are these trends really all that helpful? First we began adding to load times and creating unnecessary code-spaghetti to make our designs more visually appealing. Then we decided box-shadows, text-shadows, and very subtle background textures confused users and sought to strip out much of what many users found visually appealing while finding new ways to bloat our code even more. Yes, flat design is in, but how long will it be before we have to completely redesign everything all over again when the next visual style becomes the new in-thing for the new designers club? Personally, I hope that we start looking at what the purpose of the site or app is and create designs which complement that purpose. Blend old styles with new styles. Create completely new styles which have never been seen before. Whatever — just make it fit the purpose and content of what you are styling.