Earning Your LEED Associate's Credential

In an effort to keep pace with current trends in green construction, Mike Pearson Construction had their senior estimator (myself) register for and take the LEED Green Associate’s exam, which I (fortunately) passed.

Having a LEED Associate on staff helps companies become more competitive in a number of ways, so for our newsletter this month, we thought we’d share the process of registering, studying, and taking this exam with you.

First of all, what are the benefits to having a LEED Associate on staff? There are a number of practical advantages. Almost all of us are bidding on, working on, or will work on LEED projects. The LEED Associates exam focuses on the LEED rating system, how projects are registered, how credits and prerequisites work, minimum program requirements for LEED projects, and the details of each of the credit areas. Having a LEED Associate on staff will aid your company in navigating the LEED process by having a solid grasp of the basic concepts in the LEED process, some knowledge of techniques, and an understanding of the administrative work flow. The LEED Associate is also the first step in attaining the LEED AP credential. Project teams that have a LEED AP involved in a LEED project can earn one point under Innovation in Design, (Credit 2.) In addition, it is simply good PR to have an individual with a LEED credential on your staff.

How do you go about perusing your LEED Associate’s credential, or having one of your staff do so? First, go to the following link on the GBCI website, and register:

http://www.gbci.org/main-nav/professional-credentials/credentials.aspx

The registration fee will vary for USGBC or non-USGBC members. Our fee was $150.00. You’ll be asked to provide a letter stating that the person registering for the test is involved in the green construction field in some form or fashion.

Once the exam registration is complete, you’ll need to select a third party entity to provide the study materials. The Green Building Certification Institute does not provide study materials for this certification, so you’ll need to choose from one of the many outside parties that provide study materials for this exam on your own. I used the study materials created by a company called Green Building Education Services (www.greenexamprep.com).

The Green Building Education Services provides a printable study guide (approximately 200 pages long,) and several online tests and flash cards. The study materials are downloadable PDF’s, which must be printed. I cannot say how these materials compare to other study materials on the market, but I can say that I was very well prepared for the exam when I took it, and I scored 92%. I felt that the materials from GBES were somewhat poorly organized, and I had to read and re-read several sections of the study guide to answer what I felt were relatively simple questions. I felt that they could have done a better job of highlighting important concepts. As a result, the online tests that they provided were fairly difficult, and I had to study much harder than I had anticipated. I wouldn’t give GBES my highest grade in terms of clarity of presentation. However, the overall result was that I had to scour the materials and think critically about the concepts in order to do well in their online practice tests, which meant that I was very well prepared for the test.

The exam itself must be scheduled through another third party company called Prometric. (www.prometric.com). The exam was slightly less difficult than the practice exams. I generally scored about 85% on their practice exams, and I scored 92% on the real exam. (They advertise that if you score 80% or more on their practice exams, you should be ready for the real test, which seems to be correct.) You need to score 85% or more on the real exam, so the standards for certification are somewhat stringent.

The exam itself is 100 multiple choice questions, and you see your score as soon as you complete the test (which is a relief….or not, depending on your score!) It takes about an hour to complete the test. Once you pass the exam, you can use the LEED Associate designation after your name in professional publications and other documents.

Electing to have one of your staff earn his or her LEED Associate’s Credential is a good investment. It brings practical knowledge and good P/R to your firm. The fees for exam registration and testing materials will only total a few hundred dollars. The larger investment will definitely come from allowing your employee time to study. I would suggest allowing three months to prepare for the test. It is approximately the equivalent of a three unit college class, so use that as a rule of thumb.

John Classick – LEED Associate

Mike Pearson Construction, Inc. – Concrete Contractor Los Angeles

www.mikepearsonconstruction.com

818-999-6780

Mike Pearson Construction has been performing residential and commercial masonry and structural concrete in Los Angeles for over thirty years.

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Your Local Business Listing on Page One of Google - Part 1

Getting your website listed anywhere on page one of Google is a feat, but we’ve managed to do it for a number of search terms relevant to our industry (hardscape, brick, stone, and masonry,) so we’d thought we’d share some of our search engine optimization tactics with you.

First of all, the first page of Google search results are divided into three major categories: Local search results (which appears at the very top of the page,) organic results (which appear as a list underneath the local results,) and paid advertisements (which appear either highlighted at the top, or in a column to the right of the page.)

It’s a god idea for any regional business to focus on a local business listing, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the local results appear at the top of the page, which means that there is a higher likelihood that they will be clicked. Secondly, the competition for local results is significantly less than the rest of the organic results. If someone is searching for hardscape, the organic results produce all the matches for hardscape in the world. The local listings only return results that are centered around the location of the computer in question. (How does Google know where your computer is? At some point, most of us set our location based on a query from our computer, or we allowed a search engine to determine our geolocation, even though we probably don’t remember doing this.) In addition, through habit, when we search, we often include a location tag in our query, like “Masonry Contractor Los Angeles.”

Most businesses already have a local business listing placed through Google. If you don’t, set one up through “Google Places.” It’s a very easy process. You’ll essentially fill out a form, and then google will verify your listing via phone or postcard. Make sure to fill out the listing entirely, and use all five listing categories. Put up photos, a link to your website, and videos if you have them.

Once this is done, what then? How do you get that ad to appear on the first page of the search results? First of all, if you’d like to verify that we have some experience with this, try searching for: Stone Mason Los Angeles, Stonemason Los Angeles, Masonry Contractor Los Angeles, Masonry Los Angeles, Brick Contractor Los Angeles, or Stone Contractor Los Angeles. Mike usually shows up in the local listings at the top (and usually in the organic results, too. (We’re still working on Concrete Contractor Los Angeles – at this point, we’re on the second page of local listings for that term.)

How did we do this? What are the factors that push a local listing to the first page of Google? Well, there are a couple, but for this part, we are going to focus on what is probably the most important: Having your local business listing substantiated by other local business listings.

When Google crawls the web, and sees that your business listing is substantiated by other, trusted sources, it pushes your listing higher in the search rankings. So, when we are focusing on our local business listing, the first thing we want to do after we create our initial listing is to create other listings with the same information in free or paid directories.

Once we created the ad for Mike Pearson Construction, Inc. (Concrete and masonry contractor extraordinaire) we went and listed him again in all of the following directories. (This list we’re about to give you is SEO gold.)

AboutUs
AT+T
Brownbook
CityVoter
Insider Pages
Clush (paid)
DirectoryM
Dmoz
Hot Frog
Kudzu
listown
Local_com
losangeles.com
manta
MerchantCircle
MojoPages
Rate It All
Smartviper
SuperPages
Yelp
Service Magic
Magic Yellow
findlocal.latimes.com
salesspider
Jihoy
Insider Pages
Landscaperesource.com

These are all free. You can also add listings from paid directories, if you wish. It’s a good idea, but we’ll give you more on that in the next post!

Do It Your Self Search Engine Optimization Mike Pearson Construction Blog Mike Pearson Concrete and Masonry Contractor Los Angeles

Your Local Business Listing On Page One Of Google - Part 2

Last time we talked about creating a local listing in Google, and then listing your website in free online directories in order to push that local listing up through the rankings. We'd like to take a moment to review this concept, re-iterate its value and importance, and refute some common misconceptions about this practice.

Let's start with the things we'd like to refute. Good backlinks (from places like reputable directories) will NOT hurt your website ranking. Having someone put thousands of links on websites that have nothing to do with your website may hurt you, but listing your business with places like Yelp and MerchantCircle is not going to cause your website any harm. In fact, it will help more than you might expect. The links that you can get from good online directories, and directories that are directly related to your business are great for your website ranking. Every business should have one of their employees take a day or two and create listings in at least 20 or 30 online directories.

Now, the review of the the topics we covered in the last post: It is possible to have your local business listing appear on the first page of Google. You need three things: A Google local business listing, a healthy website (more on that later,) and good backlinks to your website. (We've provided a good list of online directories in the previous post.) If you create this local listing, and you have other listings that substantiate it linking to your website, your local listing will move up through the rankings, and eventually appear near the top of search results.

We should add that the same process can be done with Yahoo and Bing. Both Yahoo and Bing have a "local business center" of some kind (Yahoo is: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/, and Bing is: https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx)

Why does this work? Why does listing your business in online directories boost your website ranking, and therefore your local business listing rank? It's because search engines place quite a bit of emphasis on the number of quality backlinks to your site. If you have a healthy website (full of original content,) and your website has a large number of quality backlinks, your website ranking will be substantially increased. If your website ranking goes up, the ranking of your local business listing goes up. However, the local business listing has a special advantage. It is competing only with other local listings. The competition for that top slot in the local listings is significantly less than the competition for the first spot in the regular organic listings.

So, put in the local listings, and go list your business in the online directories that we gave you in the previous post. It works! If you don't believe us, Google the following terms:

Stone Mason Los Angeles
Hardscape Los Angeles
Masonry Los Angeles
Brick Contractor Los Angeles
Stone Contractor Los Angeles
Masonry Contractor Beverly Hills
Masonry Contractor Santa Monica
Masonry Contractor Calabasas
Masonry Contractor Hidden Hills
Masonry Contractor Pacific Palisades
Masonry Contractor Malibu
Barbecue Contractor Los Angeles
Structural Concrete Los Angeles

Next time, we'll examine this process a bit further, and take a look at how to create a website that is viewed favorably by search engines.

www.mikepearsonconstruction.com
www.seoinlosangeles.org