How to Rank Higher in Google Places

[Iain]

Ranking higher in Google Places can help increase traffic to your website and doesn't require any technical knowledge. Follow this guide and you'll be getting more traffic in no time.

I'll be adding to this guide to ranking higher in Google Places, so keep an eye on here and check back once a week!

The first step you need to complete is to sign up with some respected online directories. You don't need to pay for these but there are paid subscriptions available if you want to hurry things up.

FreeIndex

This is my absolute favourite directory as it allows you to get a high quality, PR7 link to your website. You can also place deep-links to specific pages of your website. FreeIndex have a ranking system that's determined PURELY on how many reviews you have.

Yelp

This directory is very similar to FreeIndex but you can't place deep-links but the one link you do get is good quality. Google take a LOT of notice when businesses are listed here.

Once you've signed up to these directories, be sure to complete your profile as much as possible. Upload photos and as much information as you possibly can. Once this is done, email the link to your page to your customers and ask them to leave a review.

Don't forget that Google Places itself also accept reviews...

One important point to note with FreeIndex and Yelp is that you CANNOT leave reviews yourself. If you do, they'll know and you run the risk of getting banned. If you ARE going to leave reviews yourself, say if a customer emails you feedback and you won't to upload it, use a different company and internet connection.

BrownBook

One of the less known directories in the UK but Google take note if your business is listed with these guys. It should only take 30 minutes to make a complete profile from scratch and will influence your ranking on Google Places. Register for BrownBook and then add your business or claim your page if it's already there. This directory lets you get some deep links, upload images and photos. It also has a quick and straight forward sign up process.

Press Releases

Writing a press release isn't as daunting as it seems and they're a great way of saying "hey Google, over here!". There's hundreds of companies that can offer a publishing service for press releases but the best one I've seen so far is PR Log who offer a free submission service as well as a paid service. I've used both and I've seen better results with the paid version but the free is great too.

Article Writing

This requires a little bit of time and some writing skill but it's within reach of almost anyone. Write an article on something relevant to the service you provide and plant some links within the article to your website. As an example, I wrote an article on Professional Window Cleaning on Squidoo. You could also use EzineArticles or HubPages as these all provide SEO benefits and are free to use.

Time

This is your absolute best friend when managing your Search Engine Optimisation campaign. However, it can also be your worst enemy, since you have no control over this. Be patient with your SEO and once your website and it's incoming links have aged, you'll start to see an increase in your search rank.

 

[KatherinJess]

Bookmarking, Press release, Article Submission, blog comments are helpful way for best ranking.

 

[Iain]

LinkedIn

This is best thought of as almost a "professional Facebook". It allows you to build up a professional profile with quality links to your website. If you have a business, you can also create a company page with deep links to specific pages and services that you provide.

Facebook

You've heard of Facebook and as there are over 800,000,000 people using it, you're probably one of them. Many people shy away from business pages as they either don't use Favebook themselves or don't see how it can increase their Google Places rank. The fact is that there are close to a billion members, so the likelihood that your customers are members is very strong. Facebook pages for businesses are so common today that people are beginning to EXPECT you to have a Facebook presence. It's free so what's the harm?

 

[Paul]

Article writing (writing skill) Mmm that's me out lol, well done on this thread Iain its very useful.


Good article enjoyed the read.

 

[Iain]

Thanks Paul. I'm adding to this thread every few days to keep it fresh with ideas that aren't too technical.

Article writing is surprisingly easy. Just pick a topic and start writing about it and aim for about 500 words but anymore is better. Afterwards just go through it for spelling and grammar, then break it down into sections to make it easier for the reader. Then you can add your well deserved links!

When article writing, it's important to remember to write UNIQUE content. Otherwise Google won't be interested and it won't help your Google Places ranking.

 

[Paul]

You know when you say add links do you mean like you have with the commercial window cleaning in your article

 

[MyLittleCleaningCompany]

Fantastic thread Iain! Many thanks for sparing the time and knowledge. Very much appreciated. J

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Iain]

You know when you say add links do you mean like you have with the commercial window cleaning in your article

You got it. These are called anchor links. There's basically two types of links. The best type of link is an anchor link which looks like this commercial cleaning uk.

Sometimes you can't add these sort of links and you have to make do with a regular link like this http://www.gsf-uk.com

 

[Iain]

Blogging - this one may require a little help

A blog, or weblog as it was originally known, is a neat little way of communicating with people in a similar, yet quite different, method to your website. A blog should be updated at least once every few weeks. Although it won't matter if you don't post anything every so often, you'll be missing out on a great opportunity to increase your website's value and PageRank.

At the moment, GSF don't have a live blog as it's still under development but it's on the way. My web design company has it's own blog which is situated under a subdomain of the website i.e. the website address is http://www.igm-computers.com and the blog address is http://blog.igm-computers.com. This means that when my blog increases in PageRank, so will my website and vice versa. This is where it can get a big tricky and you may need to help of a techy. PM me if you don't have one of these and I'll try to help.

There are at least 100 different ways of producing your blog. The most popular formats are Blogger (Google's blogging platform) or WordPress. It's suprisingly easy to set up a blogger account and point trafic to a subdomain but some people report a small loss in SEO value in comparison to WordPress. It's even easier to set up a WordPress blog (especially if you have a WordPress website) and relatively straight forward to use under a subdomain.

Once you've set up your blog, posting updates is easy. The difficult part is knowing WHAT to post. The trick I find is that if you post something useful, funny or interesting there's a possibilty that someone will link to it. Hopefully by this point, you'll appreciate the importance of links and how these can influence for Google Places ranking.

It's also a good idea to create categories for your posts, which will help visiors when they come to your blog.

An important part to note when blogging is to avoid copy/pasting like the plague. Only post ORIGINAL content, even if it's just reworded. Duplicate content will just be ignored by the search engines.

 

[Paul]

I have a blog probably a really simple one but how do you make it more public or easier to find Iain.

 

[Iain]

I have a blog probably a really simple one but how do you make it more public or easier to find Iain.

The best way to get more traffic to your blog is to post really useful information that's likely to get indexed and then searched for. Think about the sort of things that people search for in relation to window cleaning. For example, you could write about the pros and cons of cleaning your own windows or talk about local issues.

Be creative and have a bit of fun with it. The more you write on your blog, the more traffic you'll get. This will help your PageRank for the blog and website.

Your blog is already part of the website so you don't need to make any changes. One point to note is that if you ever change your hosting provider, you'll probably lose your blog.

 

[Dodger]

Heres a couple of helpful sites/tools :-

www.pingomatic.com 'A service to update different search engines that your blog has updated'

www.socialposter.com 'A social bookmarking web services poster and news submitter'

www.dmoz.org 'Last but not least just about the most important directory to submit your companies website to, google takes notice of this one big time'

Oh and just to add, www.ezinearticles.com once you are a member send out loads of very helpful emails with tutorials. You don't have to be Will Shakespeare to write good articles either.

 

[Iain]

www.dmoz.org 'Last but not least just about the most important directory to submit your companies website to, google takes notice of this one big time'

Gold dust. An absolute gem if you can get listed but they're notorious for taking their sweet time! Only ever submit to them once otherwise they'll start to ignore you.

 

[Paul]

Well I've submitted mine to the let's wait and see, they said it can take up to 2 month to get listed if at all :-/

 

[Iain]

Links

We've touched on the importance of backlinks already but one thing that hasn't yet been mentioned is the importance of maintaining a standardised linking system, or as it's more formally know "canonical" URLs. This is much more simple than it sounds - trust me.

For this explaination, I'll use our website to demonstrate. Our website address is http://www.gsf-uk.com, which is linked to through our forum signature. This is passing link value (very little but still value) over to our website. However, if we were to replace the link in our signature to http://gsf-uk.com, our website would not be benefitting from the link value. This is because the search engines see the two URls as seperate websites, even though they send the visitor to the same website! Don't ask me why, but I can explain this if you ever have difficulty sleeping...

The best advice I can pass on to manage this correctly would be to simply use the same address everytime you leave your link somewhere. It doesn't really matter whether you use the WWW version or the non-WWW version, as long as you use the same one everytime. A few years ago it became quite fashionable to remove the WWW from the URL but it honestly doesn't make any difference but I always use the WWW version.

Some website's have what's called a 301 Redirect which forward traffic and SEO value from one version of the website to the other. Paulrod's website is a good example of this.

 

[Paul]

What do you mean Iain 301 redirect is that bad :-/

 

[Iain]

What do you mean Iain 301 redirect is that bad :-/

No it's good. I used your website as an example when I first wrote about the links but realised it would complicate things. Basically if you type in your website without the WWW you get redirected to the WWW version. That's how the server that your website is on us configured. Count yourself lucky Paulie!

 

[Paul]

Ah had a little panic there lol

 

[Iain]

Ah had a little panic there lol

Yeah well stop spamming my thread!lol