Google Places Advertisement

If you’re a business owner with a local company – by that I mean a company with a local market – Google Local Business Listings (also known as Google places, or Google maps) can get you ranked near the top of Google without as much time and effort as standard organic rankings.

One of the factors Google considers in determining your business listing ranking is the number of customer reviews. Because of this, one of the first things we have clients do when working on improving rankings of a Local Business page is contact past customers and ask for reviews. Sometimes those customers need instructions, so here’s a little step-by-step to help you out.

Get your Google Local Business Listing URL:

In order to ask for reviews, you have to have a URL to send to customers where they can leave the review, right? Right. Here’s how to get that.

1. Find your Google places page. The easiest way to do this is to go to maps.google.com and search for your company name. You may need to add the city to the search. If you don’t have a business listing yet, you probably won’t show up in this search, so you’ll want to set that up first.
2. Once you’ve found your business, click the “more info” link next to the title of the listing. That will take you to your listing.
3. From there, in the top right of the page you’ll see a link that says, approrpiately, “Link,” with a little icon of a chain link next to it.
4. Click that and copy the URL that pops up
5. Paste that URL into your browser’s address bar and hit enter
   • There is a lot of extra information provided in the link Google gives you here that you don’t really need. If you have trouble following the next steps, just send your past customers the link you just copied. Otherwise, if you want to shorten that URL a bit, keep reading.
6. The URL should look something like this: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=XXXXXXXXXXXX, followed by a bunch of other stuff. Delete everything after the cid=XXXXXXXXXX part. (The X’s are actually numbers representing your unique listing ID).
7. Copy what’s remaining and paste that into your browser’s address bar again to check that it works. Hit enter.
8. If your listing pops up again, you’ve got the right URL.

Instructions for your Customers to Leave Reviews

1. Follow the link you just copied.
2. Once there, scroll down a bit until you see the heading, “Reviews by Google users.”
3. You must have a Google account to do this, so if already logged in, they’ll see a link that says “Been here? Rate and review”
4. Click on “Rate and review”
5. If not logged in, they’ll see a link that says “Been here? Sign in to rate”
6. Click “Sign in to rate”
7. If they have a Google account already, they can login and then they’ll be forwarded to a page where they can leave a review.
8. If they don’t yet have a Google account, they’ll need to click the button that says “Create an account now,” and follow the instructions to create the account. Once created, go back to the Business Listing page and click on “Rate and review” to leave a review.

That’s all there is to it. The only tripping up points are going to be if you’re customer isn’t very internet savvy and/or doesn’t yet have a Google account. But Google makes creating a new account pretty easy, so with a little assistance, they shouldn’t have any trouble leaving a review.

Hope this helps a few people out. If you’ve got questions, leave them in the comments.

One of the first things small business owners find out about when researching SEO are blogs. One of the most common questions we get is, “should I add a blog to my site?”

Blogs have gained a reputation as having the potential to boost your SEO rankings, but it’s important to understand what a blog does and why it helps, as well as when it wouldn’t help.

What is a blog, exactly?

A blog is nothing more than a collection of articles, generally appearing on a website in reverse chronological order — meaning the newest posts show up first. The key phrase there is “nothing more than a collection of articles.” That’s right, a blog is not some magical thing that will score you all kinds of love from Google; it’s nothing more than a collection of articles.

What that means is, if you really wanted to, you could create your own mock blog just by publishing articles as standard html pages on your website, then publishing another page with links to all those articles. In it’s most basic form, that’s really all a blog is.

So why does everyone say blogging helps SEO?

The simple answer is that SEO is a complicated subject. Because it’s complicated, two things end up happening:

1. Companies selling SEO services say “Blogs help SEO,” because it’s a thousand times easier than explaining why blogs help SEO, or that some blogging platforms will actually hurt your SEO, or that the same can be accomplished in Dreamweaver or another web publishing platform (albeit not as efficiently). When it comes to selling, keeping it simple helps.
2. Companies who take the blogging plunge tend to notice their traffic increases. Because SEO is a complicated subject, the easiest explanation is that the blog did it. Then, when you talk to employees in those companies, they tell you how much of an impact blogging made on their business…and the legend grows.

So…Will a Blog Help with SEO or Not?

Yes and no. It’s not the blog itself that will help with SEO. Remember, a blog is nothing more than a collection of articles. What tends to help with SEO are all the secondary things a blog does for you that you might not even be thinking about. A well-designed blog facilitates SEO best practices, by accomplishing the following:

1. If you have a blog, you should be publishing on it. Anytime you add text-rich pages to your website, you’re giving Google more content to index. More content means your website will show up for more searches. You’re casting a wider net, which tends to catch more prospects.
2. Most bloggers use WordPress. When setup properly, WordPress does a lot of stuff behind the scenes that is good for SEO. Now, don’t think I’m suggesting WordPress will always help your SEO behind the scenes. WordPress can very easily be setup in such a way that it won’t do you much good at all, and that’s entirely up to the author of your theme…or your designer/developer if you had a WordPress theme custom made.
3. However, even a perfectly setup WordPress theme won’t do you any good if you don’t follow some SEO best practices. Thankfully, WordPress makes it easier for you to follow these best practices. And we know the easier something is, the more likely we are to do it. Some of the tasks WordPress can simplify are:
   1. Adjusting meta tags (title, description, keywords)
   2. Linking to other pages on your site directly
   3. Linking blog posts together using tags, categories, and archives
   4. Proper formatting (heading tags, bold and italicized text, etc)
   5. SEO-friendly URLs (WordPress calls these “Permalinks”)
   6. In addition to these, WordPress has a huge list of plugins that can add functionality to do just about anything else you could want

What to consider before you add a blog to your site

Now it’s time for a reality check. I’ve shown that just adding a blog to your site is not going to magically get you more business. However, undertaken properly, blogging can significantly enhance your visibility online. In addition to showing up for more searches, enhanced visibility means you’ll be seen more as an authority in your industry and it will help you build your contact network with potential clients, business and advertising partners, and even “old media” contacts like newspaper and television reporters.

I’ve seen blogging do amazing things for small and large companies alike. I’ve also seen a lot of businesses fail to reap any benefits from blogging at all. Here are some important things to consider before you decide to start a blog:

1. Who will be responsible for getting blog posts published? Someone in your organization has to be committed to keeping the blog updated. This same person doesn’t have to be the one writing the blog posts…you could have anyone handle that, or you could even outsource that entirely. But one person in your organization needs to be responsible for getting posts published on time. That person should have the authority to “motivate” people to get the job done. This will be your blog editor and the responsibility for publishing blog posts rests entirely on his or her shoulders.
2. When will blog posts be published? You should set a posting schedule of once or twice per week and be consistent about it. The more consistent you are, the better off you’ll be. I’d recommend setting a day and time when posts will be published and not missing those publication deadlines. Treat your blog like a newspaper…no matter what it takes, get something published on time.
3. Who will train your people? Do yourself a favor and get some basic SEO training for your people. If funds are tight, you could just have the blog editor trained on basic SEO. If you’re able, train your writers too. There are plenty of SEO companies out there that can help you with this, including us. Just a couple hours of training will make a world of difference.
4. Which blogging platform will you use? I can’t think of any reason to use anything besides WordPress. It’s just so much farther along than any other blogging platform and it’s so widely used that if you need to expand it’s functionality in some way, there’s probably already a plugin out there that will do it for you.
5. Who will design your blog? When I say “design,” I mean design, develop, program…all of the above. If you decide to use one of the thousands of free WordPress themes, make sure it was created with SEO in mind. If you have a custom theme developed, make sure the developer is familiar with maximizing the SEO benefit of WordPress. Don’t skimp on this…if you can’t afford to pay $1500 or more for a custom WordPress theme, use a free one. You can always have a custom theme designed later, but if you skimp on a cheap custom theme, you’ll be stuck with something that may not help your SEO like it should.
6. How will you come up with post ideas?Most people find it incredibly challenging to come up with something to write about once or twice a week. If you’re one of those people, I’m here to tell you to stop over thinking it. Your blog posts don’t have to be mind-blowing insights into your industry. Sure, if you can throw in some amazing content occasionally, it’ll help tremendously, but on the whole, remember you’re writing a blog, not a New York Times best seller. It’s far more important that you publish consistently. As you continue to blog, you’ll get better at it, you’ll come up with better post ideas, and you’ll see what your readers like to read about and what they don’t like so much. Still need some help? Here’s a quick and dirty step-by-step:
   1. Publish posts on Mondays and Fridays at 7am.
   2. Write those posts a week in advance and use WordPress’ post scheduling feature to have them automatically published on the right day/time
   3. Schedule a brief Wednesday morning brainstorming session with your blogging crew (30 minutes max.)
   4. Tell everyone to have 3 post ideas ready for the Wed. morning meeting each week
   5. In the meeting, everyone shares their post ideas
   6. Pick the top 2 and assign a writer or outsource it
   7. Publish
   8. Repeat

Conclusion

If you’re reading this post, I assume you’re either considering blogging or are already doing it. Good for you! Just remember, that a little bit of preparation and understanding of the process can go a long way to ensure you reap the maximum benefit. Obviously, blogging isn’t a magical cure-all for your SEO woes, but done properly, blogging can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Now get out there and start writing!

Now, you may or may not have an Analytics account setup already so this will cover you either way.

If you DO NOT believe you have an Analytics account setup already, do this:

1. Log in to Google AdWords at http://adwords.google.com
2. Once there, click “Reporting and Tools,” then “Google Analytics”
3. You’ll see a screen like Figure 1 below that will ask if you want to link an existing Analytics account or create a new Analytics account to be linked.
   

   Figure 1 - Link AdWords and Analytics Account - Click to Enlarge

4. This is where things can get hairy. Whether you think you have an analytics account or not, you’ll probably want to start by selecting “I already have a Google Analytics account. Please link it to this AdWords account”
   • So why do it this way? Because at some point in the past, you or another web developer or someone else may have already setup an Analytics account that is tracking this site. We see this all the time (sometimes setup of Analytics is included in the services rendered by a previous developer, so even though you don’t think one was setup, it may have been anyway).
   • If you want to be absolutely sure, view the source for your site and check for existing analytics code
   • Why not just setup a new account anyway? You could, but then you wouldn’t have access to all of that valuable data collected in the old analytics account without logging in separately. That data is valuable, and you want to preserve it if possible, even if you haven’t used it up until now.
5. So, click “Continue” and AdWords will pull up a list of all Analytics accounts managed under the current user.
6. Have a quick look at the dropdown box labeled “Existing Google Analytics Account” to find out if an account already exists and, if it does, select it and press “Link my account.” Now the accounts are linked and you’re all finished.
7. If you don’t see an existing account in the dropdown, select “Cancel” and continue the instructions
8. Now you can select “Create my free Google Analytics account” and click continue
9. Follow the instructions on the next page and Google will provide you with the code you’ll need to add to your site in order to begin tracking
10. Have your developer install the code, or have us do it for you
11. All done.

If you already have an Analytics account but it’s not the same as your AdWords account, do this:

In this case, you’ll want to preserve that Analytics account with all it’s juicy historical data, so you’ll need to add your AdWords account as a user to your Analytics account in order to link the two. Here’s how:

1. Login to your Analytics account at http://analytics.google.com…You should see something like the following:
   

   Figure 2 - Google Analytics Dashboard - Click to Enlarge

2. Once there, click the “User Manager>>” link toward the bottom-middle of the page and you’ll be presented with the following Figure 3:
   

   Figure 3 - Google Analytics User Manager - Click to Enlarge

3. Click the “+ Add User” link toward the top right of that table in Figure 3
4. Now you’re presented with the following Figure 4:
   

   Figure 4 - Add User to Google Analytics - Click to Enlarge

5. In the “Email Address” field, enter the email address of your AdWords user (read that again, it’s important to get this right)
6. In the “Access Type” dropdown, make sure you choose “Account Administrator” (otherwise you won’t be able to link the accounts)
7. Click “Save Changes”
8. Now log out of Analytics
9. Log back into AdWords at http://adwords.google.com
10. Click “Reporting and Tools” tab, then “Google Analytics”
11. Now you’re presented with Figure 1 above
12. Select “I already have a Google Analytics account. Please link it to this AdWords account”
13. Click “Continue”
14. Now, in the dropdown box labeled “Existing Google Analytics Account,” select the account you just added the user to in the previous steps
    • Note: because you added your AdWords user as an Administrator on your Analytics account, you’ll now be able to link the two
15. Click “Link my account”
16. That’s it.

Hopefully these instructions will help the vast majority of AdWords-Analytics users out there. If you find you’re still having trouble, why not spend $75 with us to get up and running within a day?

Happy Holidays everybody! Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Poinsettia Day, Winter Solstice, Festivus, and any others I might have forgot! Have a great new year as well everyone!

There are literally hundreds of local search engines and directories hungry for websites to fill their indexes. Whether you’re a local, national, or global company, this will help get more traffic to your site.

You’ll no doubt want to start off at Google Places. Once you’ve posted your listing there, try this list of local search engines and directories for more.

2. Fix your meta title tags

Meta title tags are what you see in the title bar of your browser when you visit a web page. Take a look at the top of your browser window and you’ll see the title of this article. In the HTML markup, the meta title for a given page can be found between the <title></title> tags. If you edit your own site, you should have no trouble with this. If you have a developer manage your site, create a list of adjustments and have them done for you.

You want to make sure the keyword you’re targeting on a particular page appears in that title tag. Not targeting specific keywords on each page of your site? Better get on that.

Also, the keyword should appear as close to the beginning of the meta title tag as possible…of course keep in mind humans still have to understand the title so you’ll have to get creative with ways to adjust your title tags while keeping them understandable. And this leads us to our next tip…

3. Move keywords to the front of article titles

The same rule applies to article titles. Search engines place more weight on keywords appearing at the beginning of a title than those appearing toward the end. So, to get the most bang for your writing buck you should always try to get those keywords to appear toward the beginning of any meta title tags and page titles on your web pages.

If you’re blogging on WordPress, in most cases your article title will automatically be inserted into your meta title tag so you can kill two birds with one stone here. If not, adjust those page titles so the keywords are closer toward the beginning of the title.

I realize this may not be totally clear for some people, so how about an example? Let’s say you’re a Dentist in Cincinnati and you’re going after the term Cincinnati Dentist. You have a blog post entitled “How to find a stellar Dentist in Cincinnati.” Unfortunately for you, your keywords are at the very end of that title; we want to move the words Cincinnati and Dentist as close to the beginning of the title as possible to improve our rankings for those terms. So how about changing the title to “Cincinnati Dentist: How to find the best.” It took me 2 seconds to come up with that example, so it could obviously be improved to entice people to read it, but I think I’ve made my point.

4. Adjust your keyword density

Keyword Density is the ratio of the number of times your keyword appears on a page to the total number of words on that page. It’s a metric the search engines use to help determine how to rank any given page on your site. The theory being that on a page about Cincinnati Dentists, the words Cincinnati and dentist will appear more often than any other keywords.

So does this mean you have to count every word on your page? Hell no. Let a computer do it for you; there are plenty of free tools online that will calculate keyword density for you. You can start by using this tool. You can enter your URL, a competitor’s URL, a keyword and it’ll give you a detailed comparison of the keyword densities of the two URLs.

So what’s the right keyword density to shoot for? Well, that depends on the niche. But you can get a pretty good target by running that keyword tool on the top ranked sites for your keywords. Then use their keyword densities as a target when adjusting your web pages.

If you’re blogging with WordPress, you can use Wordtracker’s SEO Blogger tool to quickly check the keyword density of a blog post as you type.

For a small to medium site, you should be able to get most of these steps done in a day or less. As always, if you need some assistance with general SEO or SEO for a WordPress site, hire us!.

We have a number of smaller clients taking advantage of the lower traffic numbers on Yahoo! and Bing to run profitable PPC campaigns where they couldn’t show a profit on Google due to crazy competition running up CPCs.

Unfortunately, when Yahoo! completes the transition on the paid search side, the combined market share will be 20-30%. I have no doubt this will result in a lot more competition on Bing/Yahoo! as larger advertisers begin spending more time and money targeting the estimated 62% larger search volume and that will consequently drive up CPCs. Hopefully things won’t get too crazy, but if there was ever a time to optimize your Bing campaign, it’s now.

Have you added the rel=”nofollow” attribute to your WordPress tag cloud? Here’s a YouTube video from Matt Cutts talking about the need to add the attribute to tag clouds, where he explains that passing PageRank through the tag cloud links is probably not the most efficient way to do things.

Unfortunately, the WordPress tag cloud is generated via a function call to wp_tag_cloud and, as a result, you cannot simply add the rel=”nofollow” attribute like you would a traditional link.

So, I did a bit of searching and stumbled across a nofollow tag plugin at SmartBlogTips.com that will take care of this for you.

That said, I’m not big on adding plugins if it’s just a few lines of code. So, for those of you interested in doing this without the plugin, you can add the following lines of code to your functions.php file:

function add_nofollow_tag($sLink) {
    return str_replace('<a href=', '<a rel="nofollow" href=', $sLink);
}
add_filter('wp_tag_cloud', 'add_nofollow_tag');

That’s it. Your WordPress tag cloud should now use the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

Thanks SmartBlogTips.com for the simple plugin!

SEO is a broad topic and as technology changes, it’s becoming an increasingly large field. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and, according to Dictionary.com, SEO is “the process of adjusting the content, structure, etc, of a website so that it will be displayed prominently by a search engine.”

That’s a pretty clear definition, but it only covers one part of SEO, what we’d call On-Site SEO. There is another, much larger part of SEO and that is Off-Site SEO. So what’s the difference between the two and which, if either, is more important?

On-Site SEO

On-Site SEO covers exactly what the Dictionary.com definition suggests. Any work done on the site itself is on-site SEO. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the following:

• Adjusting meta tags to more effectively target particular keywords
• Adjusting keyword density, or the number of times a keyword appears on a page, of page body copy
• Adjusting image alt tags to clearly and concisely describe an image
• Linking together pages on a website using keywords as anchor text (internal linking)
• Linking to relevant, external resources in page body copy (external linking)
• Adjusting the overall organization of pages into a clear, often hierarchical structure
• Adjusting website code to ensure search engines don’t run into any dead ends when crawling your site (i.e. JavaScript navigation is bad)
• Adding sitemaps to help search engines easily index all pages on the site

On-site SEO tends to be more technical in nature when compared to off-site SEO. When conducting on-site SEO, you’re optimizing for a machine – a search engine bot – and so there are some concrete guidelines to follow to ensure a search bot is able to easily find all pages on your site and easily determine the topic of all the pages, as well as your site as a whole.

However, clear guidelines don’t make on-site SEO easy. The key challenge in on-site SEO is balancing optimizing for search engines and optimizing for human beings. You can never forget that the primary goal of your site is to convert visitors into customers, so it’s important to find a balance. Focus too much on the search engines and your site will read like an encyclopedia. Focus too much on humans and you may not get the rankings you need to sustain your business.

Think of on-site SEO as the concrete foundation of your website. A house with a solid foundation is a great starting point, and without a solid foundation, the rest of the house could come crumbling down. But try selling a house with nothing but the foundation…it ain’t gonna happen.

Off-Site SEO

If on-site SEO is the foundation, off-site SEO is the hardwood floors and granite counter tops of search engine rankings. It’s what really determines where you end up amongst your competitors. While on-site SEO is important, it generally won’t help you rank all by itself.

While the search engines use your website content to automatically determine what keywords you have the potential to rank for, they use other websites to determine where you should rank. Google’s success was, in large part, built upon their realization that on-site content is not enough to determine the quality of a website; they needed another concrete measure of website quality that even a robot could understand.

So, what to do? Well, when you’re in a situation where you have very limited information with which to make a decision, what do you do? If you’re like me, you seek out the advice of others; you ask for recommendations. That’s exactly what Google did to solve it’s problem. Google started looking for recommendations to determine the quality of a website. And in the online world, a link from one site to another is a pretty good indication that the former is recommending the latter in some way. Now, of course a link is not always a recommendation, but it’s a concrete, efficient metric that a search engine bot can understand and, perhaps more importantly, it was better than any other method of determining quality at the time.

And when it comes to recommendations, everyone knows they aren’t all created equal. A recommendation on a reliable car is going to hold more weight coming from your mechanic than it is coming from the girl you struck up a conversation with in the supermarket checkout line. Likewise, Google gives more weight to recommendations (links) from other sites if those sites have more and higher quality recommendations (links) themselves.

PageRank is the name Google gave it’s method of determining web page quality based on the number and quality of links pointing to that web page and it’s the primary reason Google is the dominant search engine today. Other search engines took a queue from Google and have been factoring links into their ranking algorithms for some time, but Google had a big head start and, arguably, still does it better.

So now that we understand the way search engines rank web pages, we can understand the purpose of off-site SEO, and that is, primarily, to generate links.

Off-site SEO encompasses an enormous array of tasks; here are just a few of those:

• Publishing quality content: Quality content could be an interesting article like the one you’re reading now, or it could be a free tool like Wordtracker’s SEO Blogger tool. It could be on your site or published elsewhere, and since quality content is the starting point for off-site SEO, I’ve included it here. Anything that people find genuinely useful will fall into this category. Unfortunately, in the beginning, you run into the chicken or the egg dilemma. If you don’t rank well for any search terms, nobody will find your site. But if nobody finds your site, they can’t link to your quality content and so you can’t rank well for any search terms. So the rest of off-site SEO involves getting eyeballs to your website.
• Commenting on related blogs: Once you’ve got great content, people have to find it. Comments on related blogs will be clicked on, leading those visitors to discover your quality content.
• Commenting in related forums: Same idea as commenting on blogs.
• Social networking and bookmarking: Sites like Facebook and Digg.com offer other avenues for web surfers to find your site.
• Ask for links: A lot of people are afraid to do this, but if you have something genuinely useful to offer, other website operators and bloggers will be glad to share it with their readers.
• Guest Blogging: Many bloggers are receptive to you submitting blog posts for publication on their sites. This one takes a lot of work. You might spend a few hours or more writing a quality post for another blog, but it’s a great way to get very high quality links from websites that might not otherwise link to you at first as well as bringing in traffic and potential customers from the other blog.

What is SEO to you?

Some may argue that SEO encompasses a much wider variety of tasks that just those mentioned above. What do you think? What is SEO to you? Does it include posting to Twitter and Facebook? What about offline tasks like speaking with reporters or publishing articles in your local newspaper? Could these also be considered SEO?

Unfortunately if you want to have a client test a WordPress site before it goes live you have to do a search and replace on the SQL file to change all occurrences of the client’s domain with the domain/IP for your staging server. In my experience though, that can end up being one big hassle and may not work as easily as you want it to…especially when plugins come into the picture.

Another option is to have the client edit his own Windows hosts file to point the domain at your staging server. That solves the problem of having to edit the database away from, and back to the production host name before launch. But then again, some clients don’t have the computer savvy to get this done easily…even if you walk them through it step by step.

Introducing Windows Hosts File Editor

After spending 30 minutes on the phone with a client to help him edit his Windows hosts file I thought to myself, “There has got to be a better way!” So I went searching and stumbled on a great little freeware app called Windows Hosts File Editor.

Have your client download and install this app and instead of guiding them through painful telephone tutorials on how to find the hosts file and how to show hidden files and folders, they can run the program, paste a line you send them via email into the text editor and voila, hosts file edited.

Sure it’s totally overkill for someone who can edit the hosts file himself, but never underestimate the power of simplifying tasks when working with clients. It’ll help make your job easier and you’ll look more professional.

The interesting thing is I’d bet a good chunk of people don’t even know what incontinence is…hell, I didn’t know until I saw a pharmaceutical commercial a few months ago and I just started to wonder until eventually it was all I was thinking about and I just had to know…so I looked it up.

So my question is…was this an accident, or is someone trying to subtly insult me? Pretty funny regardless.

By the way, I’ve removed the support agent’s info as I don’t want him/her catching heat should his/her higher ups come across this post; he/she was extremely helpful after all.

Highlight added for emphasis.

Dear John ,

I called to follow up on your service request regarding your Microsoft adCenter account with Bing. I’m happy to tell you that your account is now active and running. The editorial team overturned the appeal for your landing page containing pharmaceutical. I’m very sorry for the incontinence this may have caused you. I understand how it can be frustrating.

We value each of our customers and would like to provide you with a positive experience.  You may receive a survey asking you to rate our performance. Please take the time to provide your feedback as your opinion is very important to us.

If the issue you called about was not resolved or if you feel we did not provide an excellent level of service, please call us immediately and we will gladly answer your concerns.  I have documented this e-mail under service request #[request number removed].

We want to thank you for allowing us to help build your business by advertising with Microsoft adCenter.

Sincerely,

[name removed] [department removed]

Example of local map results for a local search query

Needless to say, if you’re a dry cleaner in Cincinnati, you want to own that top maps listing. But how do you get there? Simple, you claim your company listing in Google Places, much like the Yellow Pages of the web. Of course, then you may have to do some local SEO to get to the top, but claiming your listing is the first step. So, before you read the rest of this post, go claim your Google Places listing (it’s free)…go ahead…I’ll wait.

Google Tags

Okay, all set? Now that you’ve claimed your Google Places listing, Google is offering 30 days free advertising with Google Tags for Google Places. Google Tags are a simple way to help your site stand out amongst the competition in the map results. In the image above I searched for “cincinnati dry cleaners,” and you’ll notice all the listings in the maps section are pretty much the same. Now compare that to the maps results for “plastic surgeon in los angeles“:

Example of Tags in Google Places Listings

Notice the yellow tag beneath Athleo L. Cambre, M.D. That is a Google Tag. And it quite obviously makes that particular listing stand out quite a bit more. They even have a call to action (“Visit our website”). I actually had to run quite a few local search queries before I found any company at all taking advantage of Google tags for the image above, which means your competition is probably not on this yet. This could be a great way to get more clicks than your competitors even if you don’t hold one of the top spots.

Google Tags Pricing

Google has been offering tag-enhanced listings for $25 per month, but they are currently running promotion – 30 days free. You have until July 23rd to sign up, so this is your chance to give Google tags a try and you don’t even have to pay for it.

If anyone has seen a serious change as a result of adding tags to your Google Places listing, I’d love it (and I’m sure the readers would too) if you could leave a comment and let me know what kind of change you experienced.

Required Steps

I’ll cover these steps in more detail below, but this is a basic outline of what’s required to take advantage of the custom navigation menus in WordPress 3.0:

1. Define your custom nav menu in functions.php
2. Define a function that WordPress will call in the event a particular navigation menu does not exist
3. Create the navigation menus in the WordPress admin
4. Assign the newly-created navigation menus to their appropriate locations in the WordPress admin
5. Add function calls to display the navigation menus to your theme

Define Your Custom Navigation Menus

The first thing to do is let WordPress know about your new navigation menus and what you’d like to call them. So, open up functions.php and add something like the following:

add_action('after_setup_theme', 'my_after_setup_function');
function my_after_setup_function() {
/**
* The register_nav_menu function takes two parameters
* @param string $location This is the location you'll reference when you call this nav menu in your theme code
* @param string $description This is the description that will appear in the WordPress admin to help you assign a nav menu to the proper location
*/
register_nav_menu('Main Menu', 'The main site navigation menu');
register_nav_menu('Footer Nav', 'Footer navigation menu');
}

Pretty simple. In case you didn’t get it, the first parameter of register_nav_menu() is what you’ll specify in the function call to tell WordPress which nav menu to display. The second parameter is what WordPress will show you in the navigation menu admin panel that helps you assign newly-created nav menus to their proper locations.

Define an empty navigation menu function

My testing shows WordPress does some weird stuff if you register a navigation menu (as we did above), add the function call to display that navigation menu (as we’ll do below), but you don’t actually create the navigation menu in the WordPress admin. A perfect example of this might be if a client tells you he wants to add footer navigation at some point, but isn’t quite sure what he wants there just yet.

By defining a function to be run in the event a navigation menu is not created or assigned in the WordPress admin, you can future-proof things a bit.

Again, you’ll add this to your functions.php file. In this case, I’ll be returning an empty string, which is exactly what will be printed, but if you get creative, you might find a number of uses for this.

function default_nav_menu() {
return '';
}

Create the navigation menus in the WordPress admin

If you’ve read this far and you can’t figure this out you need a swift kick in the teeth, but here are a few things to remember:

• It doesn’t matter what you call your nav menu. Name it whatever you want.
• Can’t find a “home” link in the pages list? Try creating a custom item pointing to your site’s homepage
• I thought this list would be longer when I started it so here’s another bullet for you to chew on.

Assign the newly-created navigation menus to their proper locations

Remember the description parameter in the register_nav_menu functions we created earlier? Take a look at the panel that says “Theme locations” and you’ll see those descriptions above select boxes. Select the nav menu you want for each location and save it all.

Add function calls to display the navigation menus in your theme

Here’s the code to display the navigation menus. You’ll need to add this…you guessed it…where you want the navigation menu to appear:

<?php
wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'Main Menu', 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'main_nav', 'menu_class' => 'main_nav_menu', 'fallback_cb' => 'default_nav_menu' ) );
?>

A few quick notes on this function:

• There are a lot of parameters you can use for this function. Check out the function reference here
• Notice that ‘theme_location’ is the same value we specified for the $location parameter in our register_nav_menu functions in functions.php
• Also notice that ‘fallback_cb’, or fallback callback, is the empty navigation menu function (default_nav_menu) we defined in functions.php

What about formatting?

Unfortunately, WordPress only gives you the option to output the navigation menu as an unordered list. For most cases that should be fine, but in my recent experience, I had to add those little vertical lines (you know, the pipe character) between each menu item to match an existing site design. So I used the str_replace function to address the issue:

$sNav = wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'Main Menu', 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'main_nav', 'menu_class' => 'main_nav_menu', 'echo' => false, 'fallback_cb' => 'default_menu' ) );
$sNav = str_replace("</a></li>n<li ", "</a> |</li>n<li ", $sNav);
echo $sNav;

There might be a better way to do this but I prefer not to make things too complicated.

That’s it.

Wordpress 3.0 Navigation Menu

Applies to .com, .net, .mobi, .biz, .us, .org, .ca, .co.uk, and .in. Additional 18-cent ICANN fee applies.

Use code SOCCER99. Total cost after fees: $1.17.

GoDaddy

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Bing iPhone App

For you iPhone junkies, there’s an updated iPhone app available.

Mobile Social Search Results

Bing Mobile has a few social media powered enhancements. Bing claims that  over 40% of ambiguous search queries are better answered by social networks than by traditional search algorithms. In an effort to improve it’s results, Bing is including relevant results from your social network along with it’s traditional results. “So if you search for a movie, you’ll see movie showtimes first, then anything your friends may have said about it next.

Barcode Scanning

Want to do some comparison shopping? Next time you’re in a brick and mortar store, scan a product barcode or album cover art and Bing will supply comparison shopping information for that item. Sounds great, but I haven’t been able to test this yet to see how effective it is.

Bing has quite a few other enhancements, which you can read about at Discover Bing.

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Get it here: WordPress $post Object Cheatsheet