Think Insights launches with 5 main categories:

• Latest Insights
• Facts & Stats
• Research Library
• Planning Tools
• Thinking Ahead

Each category breaks down into subcategories that feature interactive statistics, videos, links, and archives. Its difficult to gauge exactly how much information is included but its safe to say don’t expect to get through it all in one night.

Latest Insights includes videos accompanied by articles about various of Google’s latest insights. The videos are very well made and I expect this section to be updated often.

Research Library is a hub containing studies, videos, and many of the supporting material that seems to be located throughout the rest of the site. Particularly useful is the ability to filter by industry and marketing objective.

Planning Tools features interactive charts, graphs, and tools. What I find amazing here is the Our Mobile Planet tool that allows you to create a chart by filtering through mobile data, country, and more.

Facts & Stats give you a bite-sized look at many different statistics. Filter by industry, media platform, and more.

There is so much information available here that this only begins to scratch the surface. It will be interesting to see how often this is updated and what is added in the future.

Regardless of how it happened, you are going to want to get this off Google’s index ASAP.

• The site could start getting visitors who would be viewing incomplete design and information
• People might start trying to order products if it is an e-commerce site
• There will be duplicate content issues which could harm the current site’s rankings

Thankfully Google gives us a tool to request the removal of an entire website from its index.

To get started you need to make an account for the site with Google Webmaster Tools.

Once you have this setup, navigate to Site Configuration -> Crawler Access. On this page is a link for Remove URL. Plug in the root domain of your site. That’s it!

We recently had two sites we submitted for removal and both were removed in under two hours.

Now that you have taken steps to remove the beta site from Google’s index, this would be a good time to prevent it from happening again. Take a look at creating a robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing your beta sites. Just remember to remove the search engine restrictions once the site goes live!

Research

The cornerstone of every successful SEO campaign is research. Keyword research, market research, and competitor research are all a must. Without proper research your SEO campaign could be targeting unrelated keywords or targeting the wrong market entirely. Before hiring an SEO company make sure that research is something they value. Ask them if they are willing to share with you the results of keyword research.

Better User Experience

Part of the SEO battle is getting your site to appear in search engines for well researched keywords. The rest of the battle is delivering informational content, turning potential customers into paying customers, and turning one time readers into returning readers. Sometimes lost in the shuffle to get more traffic to your website is the ability to keep people interested once they reach your site. Before hiring an SEO company you need to make sure they are considering what happens once someone clicks on the site. Targeting unrelated keywords, keyword stuffing, and not adhering to great usability and design standards may gain more traffic but not quality traffic. Make your SEO company agree to using no spamming tactics that will almost certainly not work out in the long run.

Break Down the Quote

When your potential SEO company gives you a quote or proposal, look for a break down of services to be performed. If they do not provide a break down, do not be afraid to ask for one.

Here are some MUST HAVES:

• Site Audit for Technical Issues – There are many issues that can prevent search engines from effectively indexing a website. Among them are duplicate pages, broken links, and bad URLs.
• Keyword Research – The keyword research to find the keywords your site should target is vital to the success of any SEO campaign. So vital in fact, that if this step is skipped no SEO campaign will reach its maximum return on investment.
• Content Optimization – Using the knowledge gained from keyword research the next step is to optimize your website’s content.

If you have the budget, I would additionally recommend link building, local search optimization, & social media optimization.

What happens if you don’t claim your listing? Well, you leave Google to guess …  and they might guess that your one location, small town meat shop is a billion dollar, global fast food restaurant.  I’m not kidding.

Above is the local listing for McDonald’s Meats, an awesome little butcher shop in Clear Lake, MN.  If you notice the reference to mcdonalds.com domain, I think we can see how this unclaimed listing isn’t getting the right business the local search traffic.

Google Places
The video is a great visual and base level explanation of how local search rankings are displayed, compiled and ranked for Google Places.

The video outlines these three main ranking factors:

• Relevance – results that categorically match what has been searched
• Prominence – results that are “well known, trusted” and show solid data from other sources on the web
• Distance – results that are near your search criteria or known location

The latest changes to Google Places have changed both the display of local search results as well as the algorithm used to rank them.  Where local used to have its own formula, now organic search trust heavily plays in your local ranking.

More Local Search Products
Along with the Google Places changes, new products focused on local search have hit the scene in the last year.  The video covers these three:

• Google HotPot: rate places and get personalized recommendations (think Yelp)
• Google Tags: visual tags that help your local listing stand out ($25/month flat fee)
• Google Boost:  a paid local search advertising option, controlled from your Place page

I’ve already increased the amount of reviews I’ve been leaving for businesses thanks to HotPot.  The interface is so simple and even kind of fun.  All of these products are aimed at a quality local search experiences for the user, but a savvy business can employ all of these to its advantage.

Of course Five can help with your local search marketing needs on all of these fronts.  It’s exciting to see the local search space get so much attention, improvement and tools and we don’t see that changing.

It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.

(View full Google Preview search screenshot)

I think this is a fabulous feature for the user and it also plays into the hands of those who create well designed websites and content pages.  Not only does the searcher have a meta title and description tag to factor into what they click, but now a visual of the destination.

In Google’s research so far, they have found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.

Good Web Design Can Bring Clicks
It’s always been true, but good design and content structure step up a notch in importance with this feature.  Consider these web design techniques to create a page that increases the chances your search result is clicked:

1.First impressions. They’re everything right?  Previewing a page with a clean, professional web design will only help you stand out from the other results.

2. A big and clear page content title. The preview is often big enough that the title of the page will clearly show up. Seeing the keywords in the title will only build trust that your page has the needed information.

3. Good content structure. If your page looks like a giant block of text, you’re likely to get skipped.  The web is a scanable read, so having a preview that shows well organized content, brief paragraphs, bullet pointed content and good uses of headers and sub-headers will let the searcher know your page will be easy to read.

The feature will even block and highlight text from your page it perceives as being the most relevant to the search.

4. The mix of content types like photos, video and graphics. Many users will prefer to access a page with strong visuals as well as text content.  Seeing that your result has a graph, photo or video like the example below to accompany the text will separate you from all of the non-visual results.

5. Flash? Forget it. As you can see from the example below, Google’s preview feature will not display Flash.  For me, just add that to the other 100 reasons not to use Flash as a main design element in your web design.

These are just my first observations and we’ll see the proof as Google rolls search previews out in the coming days.

I’m rarely excited for a change in SERPS, but this one plays right into the recipe that we’ve used for years: Good web design and good content can be created and optimized for great results.

• You can  take this search feature for a test drive here.

What are your thoughts on Google’s Preview feature?

4 Quarters Design & Build is a Five Tech client that witnessed this bleed first hand.  Their recently redesigned website earned them the opportunity to take part in a TV news story and gain valuable offline exposure for their business.

A recent deck collapse in the Twin Cities led the WCCO reporter to find a deck construction expert to contribute to their story.   A quick search on Google by the TV reporter and he had his expert, 4 Quarters owner Brian Jacobson.

Building Credibility
It’s easy to see that the key to a successful website and online marketing is credibility.  The right look and feel, helpful content and other elements all contribute to your website being viewed as a trusted resource.  That resource might be needed by a search engine or by a TV reporter, either way the benefits can be numerous.

Congrats to 4 Quarters and Brian on the air time, can we get your autograph?

Here is one of our clients, a CPA firm with 2 offices that have earned top rankings in both the local and organic results.  Their positions are boxed in red.

Consider that the user not only has 2 links to click into to bring them to their website or more information on their business, but they greatly climb the user’s trust curve by being seen multiple times on the page.  Here are the results for their 2nd office.

Occupying more of the search results page real estate should be the goal of any business.  The first step is understanding that local search and organic search are two separate things with separate elements and ranking formulas.

Your local search listings are generated from how your business is registered with the engines as well as other online resources. A great step to start with for many businesses is using GetListed.org to verify if you have claimed your local business listings with the major search engines.

With the combination of local search and organic search results working together, you can greatly increase your website’s exposure.

Two packed sessions of Minnesota business owners, marketers, web designers and more soaked up an incredible amount of Internet marketing knowledge from leading experts as well as staff from Google and Bing.  GetListed.org’s Local University delivered as promised with solid education, best practices, approach, tools and more that anyone can implement at some level for marketing online.

Personally, in helping bring the Local U event to the Twin Cities it was satisfying to hear so many of the positive comments following each session and read all of the tweets.  Below are just a few Twitter comments from the day:

This is one workshop that is only out to educate it’s attendees, not sell.

Thank you to all involved, local sponsors Deluxe & ReliaCloud, the attendees, speakers, promotional partners and friends that help me pull this together.

The amount of valuable local search and online marketing information that was shared is awesome.  Smart people that enjoy sharing their vast knowledge is what Local U is all about.  How great is that?  I’m proud to have been part of this great group and event.

Here are a few photos from the event ….

Learn more on GetListed.org and the Local University series, who’s next stop is Cleveland, Ohio in June.

Who is this conference for?

This has been a big question I get when talking about the event.  I thought I would offer a small summary of what I feel every level of business owner, marketer or SEO can get from this great opportunity.

Entry Level - If you are a business owner, running a business or a small business marketer you may very well get the most out of Local University.  A solid amount of the information and sessions are gear toward baseline education, do-it-yourself tips and giving you a clear understanding of how things work and how you can benefit.  Confusion on Internet marketing will be replaced by clarity.

Intermediate Level- Where some of the information covered might be a good refresher, you’ll still get some new angles and information.  There is no doubt that the local search expertise presenting will give you more insight into this exploding area of the web and business.  The Q & A sessions will also give you access to ask questions in some areas that might be of specific interest to you.

Expert Level- Here is a great chance to support the industry you work in.  The chance to learn may still exist within the local search presentations, but the chance to network with other great Internet marketing minds as well as business owners and other local marketers is fantastic.

This 4 hour workshop will cover fantastic information on search engine optimization, local search , social media and more.  It’s a jam packed line-up that can benefit all levels of Internet marketers.

• Register now and use the code five2010 to get $40 off, dropping your cost to just $89 for this event.

Thank you to the local sponsors helping make this event possible, Deluxe and ReliaCloud.