by Sage Lewis

David Mihm steals top honors this week with his article "Local Search Rankings Factors." Sage refers to the post as the definitive local search document, thus far. David picks the brains of the top 20 local search experts to help determine what the most important factors are for local search. He created a scale of negative five to positive five that he uses to rank topics on how important they are to impacting your rankings. With a total of 47 different criteria listed, David not only tells you how the experts ranked them, but he also tells you how much they agreed or disagreed upon their importance. Topics discussed range from the "General importance of claiming Local Business Listing" to negative factors like "Listing multiple addresses on website."

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by Stoney deGeyter

There are a lot of little things that can junk up your code, but, for the most part, the search engines don't really care. It doesn't matter to them if your HTML validates or if you keep your code "clean" or not. When it comes to analyzing your pages for search engine rankings, none of that really matters a whole lot. But when it does matter, it matters a whole lot.

Here are some typical coding issues that can screw up your on-page optimization processes:

- Errors that prevent search engines from properly spidering your pages

- An extremely high code to content ratio

- Placement of content within the code structure

- Over-burdensome code creating longer-than-usual download time

These are pretty much simplifications of the complexities of how the...

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