Clear some time this Wednesday, August 18th at 1pm Eastern (12 noon Central) for a great, free webinar on how to stand out in the local search engine results.

Thomas Petty with WSI will be leading this webinar, and has has also written a great whitepaper on the subject.
Download the whitepaper here, even if you can't make the webinar.

See below for a quick summary of what to expect:

Your Customers Are Looking For You! 

For the business owner, it has never been more important to be found in their local town, city or region for people who are already looking for them. Over 60% of us prefer to do business with a local business in our own neighborhood. This includes all kinds of “wallet-ready” businesses such as auto repair shops, electricians, hair salons, attorneys, restaurants, and so on. Each of these businesses has plenty of local competition. Furthermore, competition for placement on the search engines is stiff. How can a business stand out and easily be found by those who are searching for them? 

What's in a name? More than you can imagine when it comes to naming your website.

Several clients right now have us performing extensive keyword research to help determine the BEST names for their websites - in one case it's a blog and another it's an existing company who wishes to increase his online exposure with some smaller micro-sites.

In doing my client's research, I came upon a terrific blog post over at www.seomoz.com - 12 Rules for Choosing the Right Domain Name.

 

I encourage you to read it and also the comments below... a great lively discussion of many of the factors in choosing a website name.

Clients often want to use their business name for their domain, but it may not always be the best domain to use. So advise my clients to go over to Go Daddy and purchase the website name of your company name - but when it comes to online marketing - choose a website name that's really "going to work" for you.