Take a few minutes to increase visibility for your business!
Google Places is a significant and free way to advertise your local business. Unfortunately, many business owners are not taking advantage of this valuable tool. We want to help you set up a Google Places listing so you can make the most of this great opportunity!
We previously wrote a couple of articles entitled “Improve Google Places Ranking With These 5 Optimization Tips” and “What Are Google Tags and How Should You Use Them To Enhance Your Local Business Listing”. These were both intended for people who already had listings and just focused on a few of the features for Google Places.
Download our FREE step-by-step illustrated Google Places SEO guide intended for people who have never set up a local business listing or need additional explanation on some of the specific fields.
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Posted on August 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Who wants the worst website award?
In our previous post about the Google Panda update, we mentioned that inbound links, while still very important, are not weighted as heavily as a ranking signal as they were previously. What has gained in importance is website quality and user experience. As far as inbound links are concerned, they are still extremely important as a ranking signal but Panda now enables Google to analyze links more carefully. Unnatural linking patterns are now more likely to harm your rankings than before Panda.
Let’s talk about website quality and user experience. Imagine that you’re Google and you want to present only the best sites at the top of the search results. But how do you rate website quality via software? Quality is really something best left to a human being, or many human beings, to gauge.
For several years, Google has provided the public with a dizzying array of “free” tools and applications. These include Google Search (a tool so ubiquitous that it has become a verb), Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar and lately a number of social apps including the Google +1 button.
Google doesn’t charge for these applications. However, we all know that the popularity of Google Search is what drives Google’s core revenue business, namely, keyword sponsorships via AdWords. If everyone switched to a different search engine overnight, Google would lose 2/3 of its AdWords revenue. (The other 1/3 is derived from AdWords clicks on non-search related websites, which Google calls the Display Network.)
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