Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

What is Google Places?
Local business listings is very important in Google. If you do a local search which includes a place, town, city or local service, Google will display the local business box. That’s how important Google thinks local search results are.

What determines your Google Places Rank?
Everyone is wondering what the ranking factors for local search engine optimisation. Do you stuff your Google Places page with as many keywords as possible or what?

Here are the top 10 factors that determine your Google Places ranking – From Least important to most important -

What is Local SEO?
You may be wondering what exactly local seo is and how it can help your business. ‘Local Search Engine Optimisation’ is getting your business listed at the top of the search engine when local searches are performed.

A local search is defined as a search including a location, city, suburb, town, place, country or a local service.

This is a wonderful introduction into the world of getting your business listed on the major search engines and business directories.

The book is from the US but the explanation of local search engine optimisation and Google Places information is great.

If you want a shortcut to the top of search engines, the local business listings in the major search engines may just help you.

If you do a local search, the major search engines may display a listing of local businesses.

There are currently rumours floating around the Internet that Google may introduce a payment system for paid content.

What is Newspass
Newspass will be a micropayments system for viewing premium content. This premium content listing in the search engine result pages will be indicated with a Newspass icon. When you click on the link, your Newspass account will have the cost deducted from it.

Google announced today this it has rolled out the biggest change in it’s search engine history. Fresh content will now be displayed much faster than ever before.

The project named Google Caffeine which was mentioned in August ‘09 is now powering the world’s largest search engine – Google.

Imagine if there was a way where you could find out if someone mentioned your name, business name, product or service on the Internet.

Now you can with Google Alerts!

Why do you need to know?
Before I tell you how to setup a Google Alert, I need to let you know why it is so important to monitor this kind of activity.

Google Place Listings is the results box when you even a search query that may be location specific.

There is no hard rule for when the business listings will be displayed but it usually appears when a keyword is about a location or the type of keyword would be loacation specific.

If you entered pizza into Google, it would then show the business listings. The same would happen for accomomdation, hotel or motel.

These listings can be a very powerful tool that you can use to list your business above everyone else. Managed right and you will be up the top. Do the wrong thing, and you will be removed very quickly – within hours!

Google has been very busy this month with the release of their new design.

The left column on the search results page is more pre-dominate now with more options. A lot of people do not take advantage of the additional search options on Google. Did you know you can search through news articles, images, videos, blogs and much more?

You can also specify the time and date of your results. This means that you can do a web search with pages from this year only. This is great for researching current statistics for example.

Google has also implemented a brand result area in the search results. If you search for footballs, you now get many different areas as part of the universal search results -

• News clips
• football images
• football brands
• videos of football
• football products

All these changes are taking place to provide the user with a more user friendly appearance and better search results. Google says that by providing all these results, it adds to the users’ overall experience with the search engine.

Many people ask me why they aren’t ranked number one for their targetted keyword. I explain to them that their page needs great content and good backlinks to their site. If the content is great, people will link to it. Google will rank it higher because it is what people are looking for.

Have you ever had those phone calls from companies claiming to get your site to the first page of Google within 28 days?

Even as a search engine optimisation and marketing consultant, I still get them. I listen to their pitch and then ask a couple of questions. They usually have no clue how to answer them so what kind of service will they be providing?

I have done a search on their business name and they didn’t even come up first. That is a very easy task and a pathetic attempt on their behalf.

We advise all our customers to be aware of anyone calling up trying to sell them Internet services. There are a lot of people out there to take your money and there’s not much you can do about it if they do not deliver.

These telemarketers are driven by commission and can become aggressive pressuring you to sign up with them. I recommend avoiding any business that you have never with dealt with before or if they sound like they are over promising on what they can do.

They claim that having a good ranking will increase visitors and increase sales. This is true. It’s how they get you there – if they get your there at all. I don’t believe they will ever get you there. If you get banned from Google, that’s the end of it!

Wrap Up
Beware of any company that contacts you regarding search engine optimisation or marketing that you have not contacted first.

If you are ever unsure, contact your web developer or myself and I will tell you if it’s a good or bad.

The top 500 major Internet retailers spend approximately $1.2 million every day in search engine marketing. The problem is only 33% of their highest-priced keywords appear in the top 50 of natural search engine results.

Large corporations continue to fail with SEO efforts and keeping spending big to gain market share online.

This is where the smaller players have an equal playing field – natural search engine results.

It is estimated that 43% of people click on the number 1 natural search engine result for any query. This kind of traffic for popular keywords can really help a business grow.

Why aren’t large corporations getting in on this?
They often build their sites and think about optimising it afterwards – too late!

A solid SEO friendly web site starts withe foundations – when the web site is initially being built. Making major changes down the track can be time consuming, expensive and take up time.

What can you do about it?
You can learn how to optimise your own web site or pay an SEO expert to do it for you. Then plan a link building strategy to compliment your efforts.

When your web site is ranking well for you specific keyworkds, the amount of potential customers will increase and your online sales will increase. This means more profit for you.

Wrap Up
Optimise your web site if you haven’t already and start gaining that advantage over the big guys!!