The Maine SEO Blog

We just wrapped another SEO project at flyte, for Penmor Lithographers up in Lewiston, Maine.  Penmor specializes in offset sheet-fed printing, and as the Average Joe like me who doesn’t know what that means, just know this – they create gorgeous collateral, posters, cards, catalogs, and annual reports for their clients.  Clients who include such big names as Bates College and L.L. Bean.

Like many local businesses, one of the big keys for Penmor will be competing with local search.  But with an already expanding list of customer testimonials, they’re off to a great start!  More and more, leveraging local reviews seems to be a trend that will make or break small businesses.

So, for your next composition, binding, color separating, finishing, or mailing and fulfillment project, give Penmor Lithographers a call!

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Last week, Search Engine Roundtable posted an article about GetListed.org, a site that is incredibly helpful for local businesses.  Get Listed truly is a one stop shop, as it pulls your local listings from Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Best of the Web, and Live.

Here is flyte’s snapshot of listings:

To break things down a little further, Get Listed shows a “To Do” list for you website: showing on which sites your business is claimed, where you have photos, and even citations.

What a great tool for consolidating all of my local listings!

Nicki Hicks
Location, location, location

Two days ago was arguably one of the most important days of the 21st century.  Many of us watched “history being made”.  Interestingly enough though, even with the inauguration of President Obama taking place, the popular searches for that day weren’t entirely in his favor.

I pulled this list from SEOmoz’s Popular Searches tool:

Nicki Hicks
Guess we’d rather watch people who can’t sing..

There are tons of great blogs, forums, and sites that offer the latest and greatest SEO news.  But even if you were to spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week reading, you couldn’t keep up with all of them.  So, I offer my list: of those I believe offer the widest range of information to keep you in the know.

“News” Sites

1. Search Engine Roundtable – my all time favorite SEO news source.  Not only do they live blog for major conferences and seminars, as well as just about every major happening in the Search world, but all of the articles are remarkably short, sweet, and concise!
2. Search Engine Land – with longer articles than SE Roundtable; also the company behind SMX conferences.

Blogs

1. Matt Cutts’ blog – a must for some more in depth tips and tricks from a Google insider.
2. SEOBook blog – all things SEO by guru Aaron Wall.

Forums

1. High Rankings forum – generally speaking, I’m not a forum user; simply because of the time it takes to get caught up on threads.  However, High Rankings is the one I like the most – and forums are great for when you need a technical question answered fast!

What are your favorite sites/blogs/forums?

Nicki Hicks
“These are a few of my favorite things”

This afternoon around 3:30pm EST, US Airways Flight 1529 from NYC to Charlotte made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after the plane hit a flock of birds.  Thankfully, everyone is safe.

But that’s not the story I’d like to cover.  (For like @streko points out, we’re all tweeting reporters.)

I saw, just seconds after the crash landing, my TweetDeck light up with plane crash tweets faster than I could possibly read.  One of the links posted was to MSNBC streaming their live broadcast which, as I watched, showed a photo (which ended up being a twitpic) and the photographer and now famous Tweeter being interviewed (@jkrums).

Even though bad news typically spreads faster than good, the implication is huge for driving traffic to your website.  For the question “What are you doing?” often turns into “What are you reading?”  While Twitter links pass no link juice, you can see from this instance alone, that posting links for the buzz alone is well worth the effort.

Nicki Hicks
I find things out faster from Twitter than from CNN