David Mihm’s annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey of local SEO geeks is out. As always, I like to provide a summary of the top ten recommendations: Top 10 Ranking Factors for Google Maps/Google Places SEO Physical Address in City of Search Manually Owner-verified Place Page Proper Category Associations Volume of Traditional Structured Citations (IYPs, […]
Google, Bing & Yahoo have just announced support of a standardized set of microformats at Schema.org. Here’s the full list of supported schema types. This means that you format your templates once and “rich snippets” of your data can show up on all of the major search engines. If you haven’t already added microformats to […]
Google Offers has added a lot of detail about how the program works and tips for participating businesses. Mike B. has excerpted some of the more pertinent info so I thought I’d provide my spin on some of my favorites from the fact sheet: Publicity No photos, please! Er — actually, lots and lots of […]
I was talking to my bud Jonah Stein about his new start-up CodeGuard, a website backup service, and I thought given the events of the past few days it was worth a plug, particularly for those readers running multiple SMB websites. Let’s review some of the latest in website hacking news: Sony’s Play Station Network […]
Earlier this week I spent a few days in Barbados as a guest of Global Directories where, along with Randy Orth & Vince Graziano of EM4B, we ran a local online marketing seminar for about 200 Barbadian businesses. As I went through my talk about how to get ranked for searches like “Barbados car rental” […]
I have been hearing reports from a variety of sources that over the past few days more rich snippets have started to show up in Google Places. Using rich snippets on your site to get your content into Place Pages has been a hit-or-miss affair – mostly miss. At SMXWest, Google’s Carter Maslan told me […]
Mike Blumenthal has some concerns re Google Places’ new user review feeds: When was the last time you heard a reviewer ask for an RSS feed of their reviews? Well maybe some reviewer some place did… but then I suggest you follow Google’s instructions and go find it. Instead of attaching it to the obvious place in […]
Anyone else seeing these? Kind of useless but nice.
Leena Rao tries to make sense of Ebay’s recent acquisitions: t’s no secret that eBay has been heavily investing in a local commerce strategy. The central core of this is trying to capitalize on the $917 million online-to-offline buying market, which Forrester estimates will eventually reach $1.3 trillion (although this number seems low) and account […]
Dick Larkin’s presentation to the Association of Directory Publishers. The good news: Beer is cheaper than gas. Dick knows more about local than you do. Sit up straight and pay attention. The Future of Yellow Pages View more webinars from Dick Larkin