Local business can drive a lot of business from a website. Targeting keywords is not hard, and you can beat nationwide companies using a few techniques.

I blog for a service related company currently. I post industry news and tips and trick on doing the job and informing more about they type of service we offer. I did this for months and months, gathering traffic, most from Google searches. Many times a local business will service a lot of towns/ cities. I realized that a lot of my blog post title names were placing well in Google, so I tried an experiment.

What if I mentioned a town I service, with what I do after it? ex.[Little Rock Carpet Cleaning]

I found that this works very well. Within a few hours I was in the top 4 results for that keyword. I don’t want to get greedy, so I am going to keep it at 1 max per day. Inside the post I will talk a little about the town, and stress that we do a lot of business in the town, and list our services.

I will keep you updated to if this brings traffic from Google and if I keep ranking well.

A few moths ago I came across the importance of bounce rates on a website. A bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave the site after the first page they land on. I hear people getting around 20% bounce rates. At the time I was hovering around 80%-90%. I was curious how I could make people click through my blog more. After I started increasing the amount of anchor links I was getting bounce rates of 40%-60%

The number one thing that I started doing that nearly immediately shot the bounce rate down was adding more anchor links in my posts.

Anchor links are a link under a word. For example this is an anchor link. As you can tell it is blended within the text. Not only is this good for keyword targeting it will get visitors curious to what you wrote about.

Famous tech-startup-blog TechCrunch uses told on anchor links, back to previous posts. I have to admit, after I read a post I will go and click on one of those links to see what they wrote about it.

This is how you would code an anchor link <p> Today it was quite<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”  />Sunny</a> out site</p>. This sentence would target “Sunny” as a keyword to yoursite.com. I will use about 5 anchor links in very post, then one link at the bottom of the post if you have to attribute where the story came from.

There you have it anchor links are not only a great way to keep visitors on your website, bust also boost SEO value on your site.

If you are in the internet marketing industry, this topic always raises hell. Automatic blogging, is a blog set up to parse and re-post RSS feeds. A script will extract a summary of a post, and provide a link back to the source. The auto blog does this in hopes of driving traffic from Google. The most common scripts for auto blogging run about $50.

With the traffic from search engines, the auto blog owner attempts to lure the visitor to the ads or an affiliate banner for a related niche. This will generate money for the auto blogger.

Here are the topics people start asking questions about

1. Is this ethical? You are taking an excerpt of text from an author’s post, re-posting it on your site, and linking back. This could be free promotion, or lost profits for the author.
2. It is profitable? I would have to go with, YES. Lets figure this out. A beginner hosting account with 1&1 internet, with a domain included is $3.99 a month. This equates to about $48 a year. at $0.13 a day, its easy to cover this cost with AdSense or similar ad networks.
3. Its this spam? This is up in the air for how you interpret what “spam” means. Some auto blogs are so covered in ads you can even read the short excerpt for the post. In my opinion that is a spammy site.

Please leave a comment if you run auto blogs and let us know what scripts you use and how it has worked out for you.

Typical auto-blogged post, note the link to the original source