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Search engine optimization, or SEO, has two main components: on-page and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is the optimization of your business’s website, and it includes a number of things that you have absolute control over.

Off-page SEO refers to a number of things that you can do outside of your business’s website that have an impact on the overall ranking of your website with the search engines. Unfortunately, off-page SEO is made up of things that you cannot always control.

An example of off-page SEO is trying to get other websites to post links to your website which is commonly referred to as backlinking. This backlinking is now required more than ever to help your Google Places optimization. Let’s analyze what you now must do to your website so that it will help your listing.

Optimizing Your Website’s Meta Data

Your meta data is one of the first parts of your website that should be optimized. The meta data that should be looked into and changed if necessary includes the meta title, your meta descriptions, and your meta keywords. Google does not work with your meta keywords, but other search engines do use the meta keywords for ranking a website.

The meta title is also known as the title tag and it is the most important piece of information included in your meta data. This title is what will show on search engine results. It is not the same thing as the title you have on your homepage and it will not show up on your website anywhere. The only time that an internet user will see your meta title will be on the search engine results and at the top of the browser when they are on your website.

The information that appears directly below the title tag in search engine results is the meta description. For obvious reasons, the meta title and the meta description are extremely important as they are the first thing that your potential customers see when they perform a search online. Your meta title and your meta description should be inviting and compelling to help draw in your customers and entice them to click on your website in the search engine results. It is also important to be sure to include one or two of your keywords in the meta title and the meta description which will help with your website’s ranking.

Optimizing Your Website’s Content

The next thing you should do is optimize your website’s content. You should ensure that the way that your business address and telephone number are written is consistent throughout all of the pages on your website and that your business address and telephone number does in fact appear on all of the pages on your website. One easy way to be sure that this information is included on all of the pages is to include it in the sidebar or in the footer of the website.

No matter where you decide to put the business’s address and telephone information, you should always show the information in the “hcard microformat.” This format will ensure that your business’s location and telephone information will always be properly understood by all search engines.

Not all search engines are as advanced as Google is.  Google rarely messes this type of information up no matter what format is used, but other search engines aren’t so sophisticated. Using hcard microformat will make sure that all of the information is read correctly by all search engines.

In less technical terms, the hcard microformat is the standard way of marking up your HTML to help search engines identify which parts of your website contain the business address, telephone number, or any other information that is typically found in a directory.

Once you are sure that your address and telephone number is showing on all of the pages of your website, you get to start looking at your keywords. You should make sure that your primary keywords for each page are used throughout the page, not just in the headline, the title or the content, but throughout all of those components.

Keyword density is a term that you have probably heard before and it is common to hear SEO professionals use this term. To explain it in simple terms, keyword density is how many times you use the keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize for throughout your webpage. While it is commonly thought that you should try to have a one to three percent keyword density, this is not really the case anymore.

Search engines weren’t always quite as smart as they are now. As a result, keyword density was a huge part of your website’s optimization. Advances in search engines and how they rank websites have changed things so that it’s no longer so important to get a specific percentage for your keyword density.

It is recommended to write the content that you are going to post on your website naturally and use your keywords periodically while you are writing it, spreading them throughout your post. There are a few guidelines that we follow for our own work:

Use your primary keyword in the headline, or the title.

Use your primary keyword while you are writing the first paragraph.

Use your primary keyword somewhere throughout the body.

Use your primary keyword when you write your last paragraph.

You should also use different variations of the primary keyword. If you are using “Indianapolis Dentists” as your primary keyword, then you should try to use a variation that is similar, like “dentists in Indianapolis” in the copy when you are writing it. Using a variation that is similar, but not the same allows you to target other keywords that could bring traffic to your webpage and keep the page focused on the primary keyword.

One other thing that you should do to improve your Google Places SEO is use images on every page of your website. When you add the images, you should name them using your primary keyword. You can use both the title tag and the alt tags as opportunities to use your keywords throughout your webpage.

This is the final installment of our three part series on Google Places SEO Optimization.

Reviews

Once you have fully completed your Google Places business listing and built your citations you’ll now want to focus on getting reviews.

A) Getting onto page one search results with your Google Places listing is really important and reviews can be a big part of getting your business there. You could see businesses ranked in the top seven that have no reviews because there are many variables involved in how Google Places ranks your Google Places page, but having reviews can absolutely improve your chances of getting onto page one search results.

B) You need to have five reviews for Google Places to assign a “Star Rating” for your business. “Star Ratings” can help draw attention to a Google Places listing, so you should try to get a minimum of five reviews within the two months of your Google Places page being online. These reviews need to be posted on Google Places to help your business get a “Star Rating.”

C) Make it a habit to reply to the reviews you get from customers on a regular basis. You may not be able to reply to each and every one, but you should try to reply to as many as you can. This is a great method of filling up the reviews section of your Google Places Listing and it looks great to the potential customers who are reading the reviews.

D) You should try to get some “Best Ever” badges on your Google Places listing by getting reviews from customers who give you a “best ever” review. These little badges look great to new potential customers and give you a five-star rating automatically.

E) Reviews that are posted on other third party websites can help your Google Places listing as well. In some cases, reviews from other third party review websites are actually displayed in the local results and located under the Google Places listing. You should consider other third party review websites as a secondary focus to the reviews that you need to get on Google Places, but you should not ignore them all together. They are a great way to help your business get more out of its online presence and Google likes showing the number of these reviews at the bottom of your places page.

Some of the places that allow Reviews to be posted:

• Insider Pages
• Yahoo
• AVVO
• City Search
• Judy’s Book
• Angie’s List
• Service Magic

Third Party reviews do not always show up directly on your Google Places listing, but they are a part of your ranking with Google Places. If you want the highest ranking possible for your Google Places listing your should definitely look at getting reviews for your business on Google Places and on as many of the third party review websites as possible.

Our recommendations for the number of reviews you should have:

• Ten or more reviews on Google Places that have at least a five star rating.
• At least five positive reviews on Insider Pages.
• Ten or more positive reviews on CitySearch.

It is best to get REAL reviews from your actual customers. We highly discourage posting fake reviews because reviews from users that have posted multiple reviews for various different types of business count more than reviews for users who only post a single review on a third party review website or Google Places. Also Google can tell by your computer’s address if you are posting multiple reviews or having someone post them that doesn’t even live in your city.

Long story short: do not use FAKE reviews or make up reviews. They will be found and they will be deleted, or worse, will get your account banned. This is true on other citation sites as well.

As promised, the second part of a three part series to help business owners improve their Google Places Optimization.

Citations

Work on your citations while waiting on the Google verification PIN number to come in the mail. Citations are instances where there is a mention about your business which includes your business address, phone number, company website, and information about your products or services. Typically this information is located in business directories.

• We typically start our citation creation with Super Pages since they actually check the address with the postal service and make sure that the address is accurate.

Other great places to list your company and get high quality citations:

These are our preferred places to build citations for our clients and when we build and optimize a Google Places page for clients based in the United States:

• Insider Pages
• Merchant Circle
• YouTube
• Super Pages

Aside from our preferred websites, there are other websites that you can use to build your company’s citations.

• Manta
• Dexknows
• Yellow Pages
• Yellow Book
• Yellow Bot
• Magic Yellow
• Info USA
• City Search
• Foursquare
• Yelp
• Local.com
• ShopCity
• Angie’s List
• Judy’s Book
• Hot Frog
• Merchant Circle
• Localeze
• Kudzu
• AVVO

Canadian companies have a different set of preferred places for placing citations on the internet.

• Better Business Bureau
• Connector Local
• Yellow Pages
• Canpages
• 411.ca
• WorldWeb
• Allpages
• CanLinks
• Yelp
• Scott’s Info
• Gold Book
• Profile Canada
• Shop In Canada
• Found Locally
• Canada Web Directory
• CanadaOne
• eSourceCanada

Customers who have businesses in the United Kingdom are better off using a different set of websites for citations.

• Infoserve
• Yahoo Local UK (Yahoo Local will get the information placed on Infoserve)
• Market Location
• Qype
• Local Data Company

Other places to get citations on the internet for businesses in the United Kingdom are included in the list below.

• Scoot
• Yell.com
• Bview
• Thompson Local
• Brownbook.net
• UK Cities
• Applegate
• Touchlocal
• Smile Local
• UFindUs
• Yelp.co.uk
• Tipped
• Trusted Places

Citations Specifically For Pubs, Hotels and Restaurants:

• Fancy A Pint
• Square Meal
• Hotel Guide

Citations For Businesses in London

• Spoonfed
• London Town
• All in London
• Visit London
• London Online
• View London
• Timeout

Companies located in Australia have some options for building their online citations as well. There are a number of websites you could use listed below.

• InfoLink.com.au
• Hotfrog.com.au
• Aussieweb.com.au
• Yahoo Local Australia
• Yellow Pages Australia
• Atozpages.com.au
• Yellow Pages Australia
• Start Local
• Rayv.com.au
• TrueLocal.com.au

The suggestions that we have made for websites that you can get citations for your company are by no means your only options. There are additional local directories and local review websites that we will build citations for our clients as well. You should always build as many as you can before you create your Google Places page.

Video Citations

The idea of creating Video Citations is often overlooked, but is another important part of building citations for your business. You can use YouTube to place videos about your business and get a citation out of it by placing your business information including the company name and address, in the description box when you post the video on YouTube.

Aside from YouTube, you can get other Video Citations on websites like Vimeo or Daily Motion. On both of these websites, you want to be sure to include the business information in the description of the video when you upload it as well.

How to build citations that will help you outrank your local competition:

1. Look at your keywords and your keyword phrases and decide which ones are your top three.
2. Using Google Places, search for each of your top three keywords or phrases and your location. Look at the first seven results that come up in Google Places.
3. Create a spreadsheet to keep track of the places that each of the top seven businesses for each of your keywords or phrases uses for citations.
4. Go through the spreadsheet and the information that you gathered and build a citation on each of the websites that your competition has a citation on. You may find that some of the citations you have found for your competition are on paid listing websites. It is your choice as to whether you would like to pay to post on the paid sites.
5. If the keywords that you have chosen are extremely competitive, you will need to go one step further and use your keywords in conjunction with large cities in the country your business is located in. As an example, you may want to use Chicago or Los Angeles if you are in the United States. Just as you did with the local businesses, collect the citation information for the top seven businesses in that city for each of your keywords. Then go through and build citations for your business on the websites that those businesses have citations on. What this will do is create a truly different list of citations that should separate your business from the competition in your area.

Always be cautious when you are creating your citations. Absolutely everything about certain pieces of information that you put in about your business has to match between citations and with the information placed on your Google Places page or the citations that you have been made for your company may not end up being noted on your Google Places page and will not help to increase your Google Places page’s rankings.

The pieces of information that must match exactly are:

• Your Business Name
• Your Business Address
• Your Business Phone Number
• Your Website Address

One last note on building citations on directories and review websites: you should never try to “stuff” keywords into the listings that you create on these third party sites as citations. This is against the terms of service on almost all of these directory and review websites to begin with, but Google can also reduce the effect of your citations on your Google Places ranking if they identify any keyword stuffing going on with your citations and they may reduce what they call your “local authority boost” when they return search results to your potential customers.

It is extremely important to optimize your Google Places listing if you want to be ranked well on search results and attract new customers to your business. There are a number of factors that affect how well your optimization works to improve your ranking. This will be a three part series on your optimizing your Google Places page.

Proximity

Your business address must be located in the city you are wanting to optimize for. Google not only owns Google Places but also this thing called Google Maps which, believe it or not, can actually tell where your address is based on latitude and longitude coordinates it automatically pulls based on an address. This means that if your business is located in a suburb of a major city and you optimize for the major city and not the suburb you are out of luck, and your listing will most likely show up for neither one.

For instance if your business address says Eden Praire, Minnesota don’t put that your business is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As a rule of thumb whatever address you registered your LLC or company with is the address you should use. For those that use the wrong city Google may think you are gaming the system and will possibly ban your account.

Completeness

When you are ready, you can go ahead and build your Google Places Listing. A few things to remember when you completing your listing:

A) Do not use commas and do not stuff city or industry specific keywords in when you fill out the categories or the other parts of the listing.

B) Your phone number should be a local phone number, not a toll free phone number. If you would like to include your toll free phone number in your listing, you should include it as a secondary number, not the primary phone number.

The Google Places Title

You should only use your actual company name for the title of your business’s Google Places page. Do not add keywords to the title or business name just to try to increase your ranking. You can and likely will be suspended from Google Places if you try to do this. You also want to make sure that you input the legal name of the business exactly as you will on your citations and other 3^rd party directory sites.

The Google Places Description

When you write your business description, you are ready to start using your keywords or phrases. You will want to use one or two of your keywords when you write your description. You also want to use as much of the character limit as you can.

Make sure that you are writing something that will accurately describe your business to potential customers. This is also an area where you can give directions on finding your business if it is difficult to locate.

Photographs for Your Google Places Page

It is always recommended to use photographs on your Google Places page and there are some very specific benefits to doing so. When you add pictures you can tag them or name them and use keywords in the photograph’s title or tags.

If you upload them directly to Google Places, you cannot use keywords in the descriptions of the pictures. If you add them from another website like Photobucket or Insider Pages, you can use keywords in the descriptions and tags and you can Geo Code the pictures, which will allow you to tag them with the business’s location which help add to your credibility for owning a business in that location. Also make sure that you use the maximum ten photographs for your listing.

Here are a few more tips:

A) When you choose the first photograph that you are going to upload, carefully select it because it will most likely be the photograph that everyone will see when they view your Google Places Listing. You can also add a caption to the photograph before you upload it and save the file with the caption on it, and then upload it so your caption shows on your Google Places listing.

B) Take a few of the best reviews or testimonials that you have gotten from your customers and turn them into pictures or picture art. You can take these pictures and upload them into the photograph area of your Google Places listing.

C) Whenever possible, you should ask your customers or friends to upload their pictures to your Google Places listing using their own Google account. This is a way to end up with more than the ten photographs that you are allotted and it looks great for your potential customers who are browsing over your Google Places page.

Videos for Your Google Places Page

Videos are an important part of getting a high ranking with Google Places as well. You will want to use the maximum amount of 5 videos that are allowed just like you did with the photographs. You can use videos from YouTube that have been Geo tagged which helps when it comes to your ranking with Google Places. If you do not have videos to use, take the time to make a few with Animoto.com or consider hiring someone to make them for you.

Listing Categories for Your Google Places Page

There are some definite guidelines that must be followed when you fill out the categories section on your Google Places listing. You use these fields to describe what your business is, not what you do or what you sell. The categories that you use on Google Places need to be the same as those on any other review sites or directories. It is best that once you start typing that you use the categories that pre-populate and Google recognizes already for your type of business. Don’t make up categories.

If there are multiple terms that accurately describe what your business is, than you can use them. If there is only one way to describe what your business is, than leave the rest of the category fields empty and do not include your location in any of the category fields.

Offers for Your Google Places Page

The offers section of your Google Places listing is another important area that you can use to help improve your ranking. You have the opportunity to use keywords or phrases in the text for the offer. It will also help to improve the conversion rate of turning Google searchers on your Google Places page into customers calling or walking through your door.

Here are a couple tips:

A) Add more than one offer to your listing. You could go crazy and place twenty of them if you would like, but that may be too many to manage. Just offer more than one type of discounts for your customers to choose from with a call to action like “Call Today.”

B) When you create your “offers” add photographs of the products that are being discounted. Offers on Google Places pages tend to be more noticeable when they have a photograph instead of just plain text.

 

Google is buying rights to different business databases and they use those databases to auto-create Google Places listings for local businesses. If you want to check if Google has created a Google Places listing for your business, you can search Google maps using your business name, your business address, and your business phone number. If your business listing turns up in the search results, you should click on the “edit this place” button on the listing page.

After you have clicked on “edit this place”, you should select the button that says ‘claim your business’ and log in using your Google user name and password or the user name and password for your Gmail account. Once you are logged in, follow the prompts to claim your Google Places listing.

If your business did not show up in the search results then Google has not automatically created a listing for your business yet. That is alright, all you have to do is create a Google Places listing for your business.

The first thing you will need to do is log into your Google account using your user name and password, then go to Google Places. Once you are on the Google Places homepage, you want to click the button that says “get started.” You will get a series of prompts that will guide you to fill out basic information for your Google Places listing.

You will be able to go back and edit or change any of the information that you put in at any time in this part of the process. Complete the information that is requested as best you can. After you have completed this basic information, you will be able to verify your listing. This verification is done through the mail.

Watch your mail, because Google will send you a postcard that will include a PIN number that you will use to verify your listing. This postcard typically shows up within 7-14 business days after you complete the listing information. You need the PIN number to enter into the Google Places page, which will complete the verification process for your Google Places listing.

Do not neglect your Google Places listing. If you do not claim the Google Places listing, you are placing your business at risk. If you do not claim your Google Places listing, the listing could potentially be claimed by someone other than you, the rightful owner, and all they need to know is some specific information about your business.

If this happens, the person who claimed the listing could do a few things that could cause you business to experience some losses. A person who would falsely claim your business listing obviously does not have good intentions and they could easily move the marker on the Google Maps location which could lead to your customers being routed elsewhere even though they are looking for your business. Another thing that could happen is they could respond negatively to reviews that are placed on your Google Places listing which can lead to a negative impact on your reputation online.