For the basics on listing your local small business on Google Places see our earlier video. Below are some of the key points points for tuning up your Google Places page to get great local SEO results.

Get Some Great Reviews

One important point I forgot to mention is this video about Google Places is that you should encourage your favorite to write a positive reviews for your business. Just navigate to your page, click the “Link” link near the top right, copy it and paste in an email to some good folks.

Company / Organization

Use keywords in this field that you think your target audience will use when they are searching. For example: “Acme Corp – Widgets in Asheville.”

Telephone Number

Use a local telephone number, not an “800″ number. This is a local listing.

Categories

Choose the suggested categories that best describe AND also in local listings (Places) on the search results pages.

Additional Details

Here’s where you can really get creative. You can put almost anything about your business that you want to highlight. On our page we used our social media links for the business. If you paste a URL into the second field it will turn the word in the first into a link. For example: Facebook‎: Facebook

Complete Everything

Fill out every part of this form the best of your ability. The more complete your listing the better.

Extra credit…

Coupons

Add a coupon whether it makes sense or not. The coupon link in your listing will help it stand out from the crowd. For example our says: “Free Consultation. Contact us to discuss your marketing needs and we’ll work with you to create a custom marketing plan for your business, for free.”

For examples see our Google Places page for AVL Marketing. Now that we have it tuned up, it’s time to practice what we preach and go get some reviews…

Web design is hard. Years ago web designers had to make some tough choices when it came to typography on websites. You couldn’t just use any font you wanted for headlines or body text because unless the viewers of your site had the same fonts loaded on their machines they would get substitutes. And who knows what that would look like. So you chose from a short list of “web safe” fonts, standard fonts that everyone should have. If you insisted on controlling the fonts you could use graphics instead, but search engines can’t “read” images. Later, new ways of coding web pages (stylesheets) made it possible to use text for search engines and graphics for viewers, but it takes time to load images and fast loading pages are now an important SEO factor. More recently the use of Flash to replace text via some fancy coding solved most of those issues, and kept the text flexible. But now there’s something even better…

Google has created a Font Directory where anyone can access a growing list of fancy fonts. So a designer can code a website and specify any font in Google’s Font Directory and the viewer’s browser will go get that font to display it on the page. The only downside I see right now is that the number of fonts is rather limited, but it seems like a move in the right direction. According to Google “all fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers.” Maybe they can change that policy or also add premium fonts eventually. Or maybe they are just doing this to make indexing the World’s information easier. Surely, no one cares more about “search engine optimization” (SEO) than the big G.

Anyone using the Font Directory yet?

Google Font Directory

Google Font Previewer

Here’s a short video I made for my friend Dan. It’s really easy to add a WordPress blog your LinkedIn profile. As you can see from the video it took me less two minutes to do it, and that’s while I was blabbing about it. If you have a business-to-business enterprise, or if you’re a professional or consultant, a blog is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and experience while providing information of real value to your target market. But wait there’s more! Continually producing high quality content also has a massive SEO (search engine optimization) benefit. Your site will show up higher in search rankings if you’re using keywords related to your business. It’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.

If you’re going to do the work of creating great content you should get as much leverage from it as possible by incorporating it into your social media marketing efforts and social networking sites. So take two minutes to integrate your blog with your LinkedIn. Once it’s done, new blog posts will be automatically be added. Now that’s modern marketing. You might be surprised how many people will find your content through your LinkedIn profile.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Follow these steps to add your company to the Google Local Business Center. Make sure potential customers are able to find you business. I will take you through the entire process in this short video and I also point out a couple things that have caused problems for us in the past. For small businesses operating in a local area, as opposed to only online, it’s critical that your company show up in the Local results, which are usually at the top on search engine results pages.

There are some additional steps to take that will help make sure your company appears in the first set of Local listings, but we’ll cover those in a later video.

If you have any questions or trouble with this process just email or call and we’ll help you get it sorted out. No cost for that, we just want to help.

This is a version of the blog post checklist our writers use when they submit an article for one of our clients’ sites. The only items I have omitted are related to things that are part of our internal work flow. I’m giving it all away! Definitely watch the video because some of these items need explaining. We’ll do some more focused videos later where we can dive deep into things writing meta descriptions and title tags that can help “win the click” on the search engine results pages.

We use a checklist because we want to keep the quality consistently high, from writer to writer, blog to blog, post to post. It’s important that your business is regularly producing high quality content using SEO best practices. Doesn’t matter if the business is plumbing, a restaurant, or shoe store. Modern marketing means creating relevant media for your audience. If this type of blogging seems like more work than you want to do for your marketing program talk to us. This is what we do.

Check out the checklist below.

You can copy and paste it into Word for a printer friendly version. As always, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments and we’ll do our best to help.

SEO Blog Post Writing Checklist

Topic

Keyword Research

Title / Headline

Linking

Word Count

Meta Description

Tags & Meta Keywords

I recently spoke to the incoming class at the business incubator here in Asheville about creating content to promote their businesses. This video shows the mind map I used in that talk. There are a lot of benefits to creating content for your site, no matter type of business you have. The ideas presented here are things anyone can do to get started.

Download the entire interactive SEO Content Creation mind map.

Let me know if you want info on a particular topic.

As part of our SEO efforts we write content for the blogs of our small business clients. This is how we make sure our bloggers are using the same keywords that people are searching for. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them. Thanks!