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.

 

Need a Small Business website that has built in Seo (nap h-cards,etc) ?
Neilsons Marketing

Web Design for small business

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.

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.