Anytime Google makes a move into a new area, it tends to make the competition nervous. This is for the simple fact of what they bring to the table in talent, money and marketing power. Ignoring Google can be dangerous to your success. I’m talking about Google and the need to be listed in Google local business center because your competition is listed there and Google is sending viewers to their website/store and not yours.

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I tried to condense it down for someone who has never heard of “Google local” let alone pondered how Google would rank their site number one. The first thing I did was make this Excel spreadsheet about "Real estate agents Fort Wayne IN" so I could show how a site gets ranked 1st or 6th or not at all.

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Keyword research is the one of the most important things you can learn how to do in any kind of online marketing efforts. If you don't know what your customers are searching for and, more important, what they are calling it when they do a search, there’s no point in having a website. A couple of easy steps to get you started are as follows

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So given how important websites are to local businesses, one of the first questions to answer is "how much more business will I generate with a website?" My answer is usually, "How much effort do you want to put into it?" The first step is to claim your local listing in the search engines. This requires a little effort.

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 I read the post about Rand Fishkin's breakdown of Google's search Algorithm in 2009 and thought I would put a post together that would break this down a little more so we can understand what Google's algorithm is like and what it means to SEO.

I will try and make it easier than this.

Rand is good at what he does and he is giving out this information for the rest of us to get a better understanding of the factors Google uses to rank pages. But Google changes how they do that on a regular basis. So let’s just focus on the following:

• Trust authority of host domain - 25 percent
Sites like Yahoo, DMOZ, Wikipedia, *.gov, *.edu, human-edited content and sites that have been online for a long time. If you have 4 or more links (Google won't believe it unless they see it multiple times) from trusted links and your competitor has a 100 links from uncredited sites, you would rank higher for the trust authority part of Google's algorithm.

• Link population of specific page - 22 percent
How many links point to the specific page you are trying to get ranked? This is where
the 100 links from an uncredited site would do some good. I honestly believe that Google has a sliding scale as to whether or not they count the link.

• Anchor text of external links - 20 percent
When a page links to yours is and the link text is localseoinc.com it will account for the above link population, but not for this one. But if it says SEO services for business, you’ll get a boost.

Note: Add up the total percentages of the top 3 ( 67%) to determine how Google will rank your page. It has nothing to do with your site. Those not worried about getting high quality, well-formatted links should have their heads examined. A link-building campaign is a must.

• On page keyword use - 15 percent
(Title tags, H1, h2 h3, keyword density in text) If you don't know what this is all about, here’s my first SEO page guide. I can remember when this was about 95% of the the algorithms and all you did was craft pages to rank well.

• Traffic and CTR data - 7 percent
How many people come to your site? How often do they come back? How long do they stay? What do they do after they have been on your site? What’s your bounce rate? Google algorithm will ask all of these questions. If, when someone clicks through to your site from the search results and does not come back and continue their search for the same thing, they must have been given a good result, and so it must have been the right one. You will get a boost.

• Social graph metrics - 6 percent
This is a new one to me, but I assume how many links point to your site form a social site.

• Hosting and registration - 5 percent
Is your host known for spammers and black hat SEO who registered your site? Just stay away from them. Page load speeds and broken links.

So that's the short version of Google's search algorithm 2009.

Let me know what you think.

Andy