Google Places is a fantastic and underutilized tool for insuring that your customers can find you. Places is an expanded profile for your small business in the Google Maps search results. Google allows business owners to self-edit information displayed in Places such as:

• Categories that describe your business
• Description of your business
• Your website URL
• Contact information… address, phone, email, etc.
• Hours of operation
• Types of payment accepted (Visa, MasterCard, etc.)

By simply making sure that all of the information in your Google Places webpage is populated and correct you will bring your Google listing ahead of much of your competition.

Look for your Google Place listing by searching Google Maps for your business:

Search the listings to find your business. You may edit the listing by clicking on the “Edit this place” link. You will need a Google Account. The first time you attempt to edit your Google Places information you will be asked to authenticate yourself via either a phone call or through a postcard mailed to the business address.

Recently Moki Systems was invited to teach, at Dixie State College, the first class in a series as part of the SEED Dixie program. (http://www.seedutah.com/)

I’ve uploaded the slides (in Microsoft PowerPoint format) that were used during the class in case any class members want to refer to them. Feel free to comment with any questions you have.

Link to slides: SEO Presentation

In response to the question “How can I improve my site’s ranking?” Google has given the answer. “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Hundreds of factors go into determining a sites rank within a search engine, however, possibly the most important is the number of high-quality inbound links to your website. By high-quality we mean sites that themselves rank high in search engines, and are relevant and similar to your websites content.

A simple search on “Link Submission” on Google will turn up thousands of websites that will accept, and dispay a link to your site on their site. You could go about submitting to hundreds of these sites, but it will likely not increase you position within any search engine. These submissions can actually hurt your site’s ranking, not improve it.

So who should I submit my link to?

While trying to avoid submitting your link to a hundred places, there are a few key places that you should submit to. You will want to add your site to the Google Index. Yahoo also provides a free site submission into their index here. You may want to consider adding your site to DMOZ.org. DMOZ is a web directory which is human edited. Getting your site listed here will also get your site listed in the Google Directory (Google uses DMOZ.org’s directory). You can submit your site to DMOZ here.

Great. Now What?

After you have submitted your site to the major search engines, you’ll want to trade links with websites that are well placed within your industry. Do a google search on a few keywords that pertain to your website. Lets say “poodle puppies.” Get the list of the top 15-20 websites that currently appear on Google or Yahoo under that keyword. Next, write an individual email to each of them asking to trade links with them. You may even consider buying a link on their site.

As soon as they add the links and the search engines become aware that they link to your site, your site’s ranking will dramatically increase.

The key to success here is not to give up. You should be continually trying to get high quality links to your site as you grow. My Next article will deal with internally improving your website to increase your ranking on Search Engines. We’ll talk about layout, structure, meta tags, alt tags and title tags that will affect your site’s ranking.

Stay Tuned!