If you are a local business selling a certain product/service, one of the best things you can do to continue being a strong presence in local search engine results is to build local links. These can both help you in your entire SEO strategy but they are also great citations for Google Places as well.

Here are some top notch ideas to get some local links and citations for your business:

1. Local business directories

These are probably the most used opportunities. Just use queries like “list your business” + city name, city name+keyword+get a listing, city name+keyword+add your business etc. and you should be getting some nice local places for grabbing some links.

2. Local events sponsorships

There are many organisations that accept sponsors when they are planning an event and the best thing when doing this is that many of them are usually linking out to sponsors from their website. Searching for local events from your city and getting some “safe paid links” from sponsorships could increase your local authority with ease. Along with sponsorships you can use queries containing city name and donate, city name and help me raise money and so on. There will be a handful of link opportunities there.

3. Links from local authority sites

Have you ever seen pages like “local businesses” on sites like let’s say Chamber of Commerce? Those are the perfect places to get some extra links and/or citations for your online local business.

4. Local forums

Although you are not getting so much value from a signature or bio link, these are great because they contribute to link diversity and also strengthen your local authority. Whether we are talking about weight loss forums or local events forums, they all worth getting a link from, when being local laser targeted.

5. Local service providers

You have probably used many local services in the past, from cleaners to movers and even plumbers maybe. Not all but many of those service providers usually offer the opportunity of getting a backlink by writing a testimonial. Think about what local service providers you have used in the past and write them back, asking them if they would be willing to publish your testimonial in exchange of a link to your website. A great way for grabbing some local citations.

You might think that link building is designed only to help your keywords rank higher in Google’s organic search results and it does not have any relevancy in context with Google Places. However, while Google Places it’s strictly related to geo-targeted results, it is almost an obvious thing that certain links from certain websites can definitely help your Places listing rank higher.

Here are some tips to help your listing get a higher letter in Google Places results:

1.      Anchor text

Whether you are trying to rank higher for a keyword like “search engine optimisation firm” in organic listings or for a geo-targeted one like “Trowbridge search engine optimisation firm” in Google Places, a link anchored with the second long-tail keyword can help you in both cases. First, you add some link diversity to your link profile, thus helping you in organic results and second, you are strengthening your local relevancy.

2.      Page/website relevancy

If a Trowbridge targeted news website links to you, whether with or without an anchor text, this can help as well by being relevant to your location. Finding local opportunities can be most of the times easier than you think, from local business directories to local newspapers and local bloggers, all these can easily give you a valuable link.

3.      IPs

Though this is a more difficult one, getting links from websites hosted on local servers can make the difference. Of course, this is not something to start running for right away but it is a great method to add to your “link building for Google Places” arsenal.

Local search has recently become what more and more small/medium businesses are interested in. A high ranking in Google Places can bring crazy amounts of laser-targeted traffic to a certain business and Google guys are aware of this, thus trying to improve their results every month.

Not so long ago, Google improved their photo viewer for Places for an easier and quicker pictures exploration and recently they have announced a new exciting improvement: users can now contribute with personal photos of certain Places and upload them in order to get more ideas about a place.

They have tried to make it easy for anyone trying to upload a photo: just go to the “Photos” section of a place page and search for the “Upload a photo” link; click on it, browse for high-quality photos from your computer and add them to the photos’ group. However, uploaded photos should comply with Google’s review guidelines, let’s hope users will not starting abuse of this new feature.

So, have recently been to a fancy restaurant and took a picture of a popular dish? Why not sharing it with other users on Google Places? Once the photo will be uploaded they will not only be available on Google Places results but also on Google and Google Earth. Could this be a small opportunity for local SEO companies?

In 2009, Google launched a major Google Places Quality Guidelines update. However, a new major update has been released recently and all SEOs for local optimisation are waiting to see whether this update will come with major penalties or not for not complying with their Quality Guidelines.

These new guidelines are obviously targeted at the latest “spam” strategies to rank high in local listings and we should talk a little about those in this post. We will not list all the changes but only those that really deserve a closer look.

1. Only business owners or authorized representatives may verify their business listings on Google Places – bye bye SMS verification?
2. Account email address – if your business website is http://www.webcreationuk.com/ you should use an email account under your business domain, such as info@webcreationuk.com
3. Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world – this is/was a very common method to trick the search engines: instead of just using name of business as title, people were usually adding a few keywords representing their business (e.g. instead of let’s say B&C ltd they were using B&C Teeth Whitening London)
4. No more marketing taglines in business name
5. No more P.O. Boxes addresses – the location must be the one where the business physically exists
6. A business serving an area instead of a location should create one single area for the central office, not multiple locations for each city it operates in
7. No keywords or URLs in address lines
8. Instead of call center numbers a business should use a local phone number
9. No more “Teeth whitening London” in categories – location-based information in categories was another way to trick the engines
10. Only one category/entry field
11. Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers can be added to Google Places listing

And lastly: the disclaimer saying that Google reserves the right to suspend the access to Google Places to any individual/business that violates their guidelines.

Should this be a warning for business owners or Internet marketers that create un-existent business listings that their ranks will go down? There are tens of thousands of websites that rank higher in Google Places just due to over-optimisation, stuffed keywords or fake reviews, should their “creators” be worried?

It seems that Google is rolling out changes after changes, and the latest one is related to the local results – the Place Search. It is not unusual that they put a lot of emphasis on local searches while we all know this type of search is getting more and more popular these days. Whether we are looking for a plumber, website design firm or restaurant, we are trying to search for those that are located as near as possible to where we live, and guys at Google are aware of this.

Place Search organises all kinds of information around places.  Search results will be targeted around specific locations therefore comparing services, products or reviews becomes an easy task for everyone. There are two types of results as you can see in the uploaded images, the results for “London flowers” and “Trowbridge plumbers”. As we may see in the first image, it is like the organic results do not count anymore, the first page is filled with all local results.

This can be a good thing for one, but a bad thing for others that were ranking on top organic searches. Every listing has a description for visitors to know exactly what it has to offer, they reveal reviews from different sites. Basically, all the information is grouped for folks to easily find what they are looking for locally and compare the results.

A new add-on would be the link to “Places” in the left of search results page. So let’s say you are in London, searching for restaurants. To trigger the Places results just click on the link and there you have it. Tech guys at Google claim their new technology connects hundreds of millions of sites with over 50 million locations and this new Place Search will save people about two seconds when searching for local information. Place Search is due to bee available in more than 40 languages worldwide.

The website designers at WebCreationUK are keeping an eye on this subject and will update this news as soon as something new is released online.

Our three posts about tips for ranking higher in Google Places, though they mentioned the basics such as climbing the 7-boxes results from Google, it seems that they need an update. This article will explain how to get more geotargeted listings that strengthen your business listing.

There are three great ways for accomplishing this:

-          Geotargeted photos

-          Geotargeted videos

-          Google Maps

Let’s take them one by one and see how to do this. First, there are photo sharing websites where you can geotarget a picture on map, these have major importance. The websites we are talking about are Panoramio and Flickr, of course there are more with this feature but these two seem to be the most relevant for Google. The steps are easy, signup for an account with them, upload some pictures relevant to your business and geotarget them on the map. The most photos you upload, the better for your listing.

The second method for getting geotargeted citations is by using YouTube. Creating a video is such an easy task nowadays when you only need some photos and by using websites like Animoto a video is created in minutes. Secondly, you would need to upload the video on YouTube and in the description write the address of your business exactly as it is in the Google Places listing.

Third one, a little more grey hat than white hat, would be to go to Google Maps at My Maps, create a new one, add the video from YouTube, use relevant keywords and pin it to the map.

Although those might seem like some easy tasks ( and sure they are ), they carry a lot of weight on your Google Places listing and all the improvements that can be done should be done in order to almost guarantee 7-boxes rankings.

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