Google Places App Joins Maturing Market — AppAdvice

This is not exactly Hot off the press news but it is important to your local business :

In the mobile world, reviews of business establishments are just a click or two away. Now, Google has released an official Google Places app for the iPhone/iPod touch. Users can rate local restaurants, bars, and other attractions, or read what others have to say.

According to its developers, the app “helps you find places near where you are, (and) it gives you the best places to go for you by personalizing your search results.”

Using your iPhone’s GPS, the app determines where you are right now. This makes it easy to rate an establishment before you even head out. The more reviews you make, the better the recommendations you will receive.

The app is tied directly to the Google Hotpot website, which is located at google.com/hotpot. Here you can add your list of friends and begin rating places you already know. In time, Google Places will know more about you (and your friends) and offer you better recommendations.

The Google Places app works fine, but it is just one of many in an already crowded field. Yelp! and foursquare offer similar apps and both have been around for quite a while now. You begin to wonder if the market really needs another way for us to rate an attraction and tell the world about it.

The free Google Places app is available today in the App Store.

Google Places App Joins Maturing Market — AppAdvice.

via Google Places App Joins Maturing Market — AppAdvice.

5 Practical Link Building Strategies for Local Businesses | Search Engine People | Toronto

I found that for Canadian Local Business trying to gain local visibility its not as easy as 123…. but then again what is.

For instance while Google Places is relatively easy to do  for a new business you have to wait three weeks for postal verification as Google stopped offering Phone verification for new business January 2011 (there are some workarounds here  >> Workarounds)

Don’t try getting a local listing on Yahoo as its not offered in Canada although strangely there are some local listings in Yahoo.. most likely paid versions.

There are hundreds of directory’s, like yellow pages,frog and others but the value verses time is always a concern. Most small business owners have other things that demand attention … like getting that yearly appointment with the tax consultant done.

Below is a post from searchenginepeople  (one of my favorites)

5 Practical Link Building Strategies

When I think of building business for local merchants, I almost always like to think of the return on investment of the link itself.

Since Google gives SEO‘s just enough rope to hang us with, the return, at least in my opinion, should be the amount of referring traffic the back link sends. In other words, the measurement of success is the traffic you get from each referral, not where in the rankings you fall.

The best link building practices build networks that go beyond dumping exact anchor text URLs across the web. The best link building practices involve leveraging a businesses existing network for traffic referrals first because the return is the highest there.

Link Building Angles

Here is a list of link building angles I like to start with when dealing with local and regional businesses who are looking to expand their presence online. Maybe boring but they are tried and true and help build links that build the business with genuine traffic (in most cases) than rely on getting “there” eventually based on what we, as SEO’s think the search engines want.

Read more: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/local-business-link-building-strategy-howto.html#ixzz1umCZK3Ts

via 5 Practical Link Building Strategies for Local Businesses | Search Engine People | Toronto.

 

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Choose The Right Categories for Your Google LBC Listing | The Expand2Web Blog

Getting your offline business into the Google “Lucky 7 Pack” depends on number of factors. One of the most important is the categories that you choose for your business.

When you claim or update your Google LBC listing you can choose up to 5 categories for your business.

Finding all the categories that apply to your business can be tricky though, because Google doesn’t allow you to select from a complete list. It only provides a short-list of suggestions related to what you are typing in.

Maps guru Mike Blumenthal recently released a tool that allows you to search the entire database of Google Maps categories based on synonyms. It’s a great way to discover all the categories that might apply to your business.

Here’s a link to the Google LBC Category Preview tool.

via Choose The Right Categories for Your Google LBC Listing | The Expand2Web Blog.

OK, I’ve Got A Website For My Business. Now What? | Search Engine People | Toronto

OK, I’ve Got A Website For My Business. Now What?

So you’ve set up a website for your business, and you even have a Blog. But now what? How do you turn this new website into a continuous stream of new customers for your business?

Well, there are a lot of things you can do next. But if I had to pick only 5, here’s what they would be:

1) Claim Your Google Places Page

If you are a business with a physical address, claim your Google Places page and completely fill it out. The more descriptive and complete you can be, the better. And take special care in choosing your categories, because they will determine which keywords your business will show up for in the Google Places search results.

You should also claim your Bing, Yahoo and Yelp local listings, using the exact same business name, address and phone number as you used for your Google Places Page. While you’re at it, you should claim a Foursquare page for your business too.

•  Workarounds for Google Places Verification
•  Optimising Your Google Places
•  Google Places #1: How To Get A Red Balloon In 10 Steps

2) Create Your Content Plan

Google likes sites with fresh, unique content. So you need to have a plan for how you are going to update your website regularly. Plan out your next 10 article topics and release one every week at the minimum. If you’re too busy to write them, hire a copywriter to get it done for you. If your website is based on WordPress, you can schedule these to be published automatically over time.

Think about topics that your customers have questions around. For example, if you are a chiropractor, what are the top 10 questions or concerns new patients have? Write an article about each one of those.

These articles will help you rank for many extra search terms, and keep Google and Bing crawlers coming back to your site every time you publish new content.

•  Get Your Own Content Development Process With This 4 Step Action Plan
•  Using An Editorial Calendar For Your Blog
•  How To Write So It Matters

3) Get Some Links!

To get your site to rank, you need links from other sites that Google respects.

If you are a local business, get links from your Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, suppliers, partners and friends. If you know a college student, get a link from their .edu website. Find hyper-local blogs that cover your city, neighborhood or area and provide articles for them, and include a link to your website in the article.

Getting these links is critical to your website ranking for local searches.

•  5 Practical Link Building Strategies for Local Businesses
•  Link Building: Beginner’s Introduction to Basic Concepts
•  On Page Optimization Tips for Local Businesses

4) Set Up Google Analytics

Google provides a free tool to help you measure how well your website is working. It is called Google Analytics, and it can provide a treasure trove of information. Once this is set up, you can measure how many people are coming to your website every day, which keywords they are using to find it, which pages they are interacting with the most, and lots of other valuable information.

With this in place, you can measure the impact of your marketing investments, and determine the effect they are having on your website traffic and conversions. You could also verify your website in Google Webmaster Tools to get even more insights about how your website is performing in the search results.

•  How to Set Up Your Google Analytics Account Structure to Avoid Headaches Later
•  Google Analytics Profile Architecture for Dummies
•  Google Analytics Filter Best Practices

5) Mobile Enable Your Website

This year, more Internet-enabled mobile devices were sold than PCs. Look around you – everyone seems to have an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone. But if someone visits your website with their mobile device, do you show them a page formatted specifically for the device, or land them in “pinch and zoom hell?”

Studies show that mobile visitors are more “goal oriented” than people who visit your website from their desktop or laptop. They spend less time on your website, and view less pages. And mobile connections are usually much slower.

So you need to make it easy for them to find what they want – fast. If you are a local business they are probably looking for your phone number, directions to your business, or business hours. Make sure your website automatically detects mobile visitors and delivers them pages that help them call you or find you.

Ok, there are a lot more things to do after you get your website in place. What else do YOU recommend? Let’s make this post and the comments a collection of all the best ideas. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

•  Do I need a mobile site: 10 Question Checklist
•  What URL Should I Use For My Mobile Website?
•  Basic Mobile Strategy For Any Small Business [No Problem]

Written by Don Campbell Don is President of Expand2Web, where he writes about WordPress for businessand local search marketing.The Expand2Web Blog

Read more: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/business-website-now-what.html#ixzz1u6pJrcDH

Retire Happy Blog | make retirement the best years of your life

Understanding Pension Splitting Rules– Reduce Taxes
Written by Jim Yih in Pension,
New pension splitting rules were introduced in Canada in 2007 and in my opinion, it was one of the most significant tax breaks given to retired couples. Income splitting is a great strategy to reduce taxes if you can move income from a higher income earner to a lower income earner. An individual who makes…

via Retire Happy Blog | make retirement the best years of your life.

Improve Local Search Results for Business

By John Jantsch

Increasingly, when folks turn to a search engine, they aren’t looking for something around the world, they’re looking for something around the block. The good news for local businesses is they aren’t just looking; they’re jumping in the car, going out and buying what they find when they search.Make it a priority to improve search results for your business, because this new way of finding and buying locally means that your business better show up in the top results when people turn to a search engine to shop locally.

Below are five local search engine optimization and search engine marketing plays that you can do today to improve your chances of coming up big in the local search game.

Be Geographically Complete.
Search engines want to return the best local search results, so make sure you have lots of local markers on your pages and pointing to your pages. Things like addresses, city names, suburb names, neighborhood names, zip codes, area codes, maps and directions are all markers that say your business is local. Sprinkle this kind of data liberally throughout your site and make sure you use city names in high priority text such as internal links and headlines.

You should also have geographic links pointing to your business.
You can do this by adding local links and descriptions that point to your site in social media profiles and exchanging links with other local businesses and strategic partners.
Lastly, make sure the location data in the primary directory and data service providers is accurate and complete. Two of the best ways to accomplish this little technical piece is to visit GetListed.org or use the annual listing service of UBL.org

Be a Community Resource.
Another powerful way to improve local search results and amplify your local search opportunities is to create content that is related to your community, regardless of whether it directly relates to your products or services.
A great example of this might include coverage of local sporting events or festivals. A B2B example might include maintaining a calendar of networking events or business related seminars.
Using a little RSS magic and a bookmarking tool like Delicious, you could even automate the aggregation of news and other related content for neighborhoods with very little work.
The net effect is that you’ll improve local search results by creating content that offers value to local readers and this is just the kind of information the search engines value the most.

Create Neighborhood Pages   … read the rest…and as a bonus there is an application at the end of the article  that you can use for your local business

Cheers,

John Neilson

Small Biz Web Design

via Improve Local Search Results for Business | OPEN.