Important: Do Not Edit New Categories In Google Places Dashboard

Jade Wang Community Manager for Google+ Local announced at Google Business Help thread that if you are getting new categories in your business listings which you have not selected, please do not touch them.

She explained in this regard that there is a bug (don't be surprised) which they are working to fix and if you try to update those categories, it may cause more issues.

In words of Jade:

We've found a technical issue affecting some users that causes a handful of new categories are showing up in Places dashboards. We're working on a fix and will come back with an update when we can. Please do not edit these categories for now while we work on the issue. Please note that these categories do not show on the publicly-available listing.

So local business owners take care and don’t touch those categories at present. However Jade has not yet indicated when it will be good to edit those categories.

More discussion with Jade at Google Business Help.

Ignore These SEO Shortcuts For Better Results

Anyone who knows anything about SEO must know that it isn’t a quick fix & that it’s not going to work overnight. It takes time to see results, which can sometimes be frustrating as it can be long. Website owners most of the times want to do all that they can to speed the process up. This is a bad idea for many reasons. SEO isn’t meant to be a fast solution. Below are a few SEO shortcuts to avoid for better results.

No Keyword Research

The first step of an SEO campaign is to conduct keyword research for every page of the website. Obviously this is a time consuming task, especially for a website that has more than fifty pages. Due to this reason website owners think that’s it’s OK to skip this step as they “already know what keywords they want to target”. They think that they do what they want to target, but are those keywords the best option for them? You simply don’t know what is best for the website until you conduct research. Keyword research provides website owners with new insights and keyword competition data. It’s important to target a combination of broad and niche (long tail) keywords not only for rankings or results but also for more traffic.

Not Optimizing Every Page

Owners of large websites often think that they don’t need to optimize every page, only the “important” pages like home page or service page. But are they sure that optimizing all of the pages is not important? All web pages of the website serve a purpose and if they don’t, consider removing them entirely. The search engines rank individual web pages with a specific purpose, not websites as a whole. An interior “Services” page can even rank better than the homepage for some specific keywords as long as it has built link and trust over time. It’s OK to optimize the website in phases if it’s a large project, but ultimately every page should receive SEO attention for optimal and best results.

No Meta Tag Copyrighting

Meta tags aren’t the ranking factors as they once were, but they still have a purpose in optimization of website. The title tag is the clickable link that is indexed and read by the search engines. The Meta tag description is found beneath the title on a search engine results page and is like a “sales pitch”. It should include keywords and get the searcher to click on your page instead of the other results that they are seeing. The H1 tag is the “header” of the page and the first text that a spider reads on the page and collects in its memory. Image tags are useful because a search engine spider can’t “see” the image, so it provides one more text optimization opportunity to include keywords with images.

Buying Links

Links shouldn’t be bought, they should be only earned. The search engines know very well the difference for both. Most links that are paid don’t hold much value anyway and for a longtime. Spend your time and best resources on creating quality content to establish relevant inbound links which help to gain trust and value for websites in the search engines.

Automatic Updates to Google Places Listings

We all know the importance of claiming the business listing on Google Places and making sure the listing is updated and the business details are consistent with other local listings all over the web. This will help improve your visibility in local searches, drive traffic to your website, and give you control of your business information, hours, photos, and videos…until now.

Google announced that based on information from users and other sources on the web your “business listing will automatically be updated and the business owner will be sent an email notification about the change will occur”. Google has always given users the option to provide feedback about business information. Now if a user provides information about your business, or Google found any new information from another web source, your listing will be automatically updated for the information. However, Google will send an email notification to the owner of the listing about the change. This will give you the opportunity to log in to your Google Places account and get fix the issue if not correct. Also this change will not affect your AdWords with location extensions or AdWords Express, although other aspects of your listing will be affected if any action is not taken by owner against the updates.

According to Google, this new feature is to ensure listings are as accurate as possible because they feel for some business owners, “to update their Google Places account may not always be top of mind”. However, this is a surprising and somewhat problematic update. Also, this could be potentially hard to business owners to have their listing changed erroneously or maliciously.

Also these automatic updates expose businesses to possible abuse, owners must now be more concern about monitoring their Places listings. As a business owner, the best things to do is to make sure the email address in your Google Places account is up-to-date, and to stay on top of emails from Google and to monitor your listing closely.

I would like your views and research in the same direction if any. Your views will be more helpful for SMB's.

Go for Google Listing

Hi Friends,

Today I am going to open the way for the Google Local Listing of business. Google uses it as Google Places.
If your business provide the services to customers in a fixed area than you should go for the google places. It is more beneficial for the businesses which provide their services in local area.

To add the business just follow few steps:-
1. Create a Google account.(Account name should be related to business name.)
2. Login to the account.
3. Go to Maps section of Google.
4. Click on Put your business on Google Maps.
5. Choose your country and enter the contact number of the business.(Google just want to ensure that your business is already listed or not also someone has not use that number)
6. If no other business is found with that number than you will be redirected to the section to add new business details.
7. You have to enter all the details of your business like business name, address, contact number, email address, description etc.
8. After entering all the information just click on submit button.
9. This is not all for the complete listing. You have to verify the physical presence of your business.
10 For this Google will sent you a letter consisting the pin code for the activation of your business listing.
11. Just enter the pin code in the listing. You can  find your listing by logging in to your Business account using your Google account information.
12. It will take about 6 weeks for the business listing to be live on Google.

Here are the few steps for the Google listing be live and active. You can now go on to list the business on other business listing sites.

I will discuss about that later on.

Best Local Listing Sites

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, Google Places is the hot topic

for local seo and getting businesses found online. Local directories are being phased out (by google)

and Google is starting to own the local listings themselves, and anyone with a business that needs to drive local clients can usually utilize Google Places to take care of business.

Now that the intro is out of the way, lets get to brass tacks.

Citations.

Citation SITES, that is. Here is a list that of sites that Google pulls map data from that will help

local businesses with reviews.

Enjoy 

local.Yahoo.com

Yellowpages.com

411.com

infospace.com

anywho.com

judysbook.com

yellowbot.com

shopcity.com

dexknows.com

magicyellow.com

zidster.com

infousa.com

localeze.com

yelp.com

citysearch.com

yellowbook.com

insiderpages.com

kudzu.com

local.com

merchantcircle.com

cityvoter.com

citysquares.com

foursquare.com

hotfrog.com

rateitall.com

bestofthewest.com

qype.com

Angies List

Brownbook

ziplocal.com

foundlocally.com

citydirect.info

frommers.com

ibegin.com

daplus.us

hotpot (google)

gowalla

urbanspoon

zagat

tripadvisor

ezlocal.com

backpage.com

metromix

nymag.com

parentsconnect.com

servicemagic.com

cosmotourist.com

trivago

blog.hostelbookers.com

promotionalcodes.com

couponsnapshot.com

avvo.com

More google citation sites coming soon!