Google Local Business Center

First you need to go to Google’s local business center and sign in, or sign up for an account. It’s free so sign up if you don’t have an account. Now you need to click on “add new listing”. Once you fill out your information make sure that the pin on the map is correct. This is pretty important because you don’t want your customers to get lost. Next, select a category. Try to be as specific as possible. Just start typing a category and Google will give you choices.

The next step is to fill in your business hours and how you accept payment. Once that is finished you can upload a photo of your business. The photo will appear next to your add in the search, so be sure to pick something appropriate.

Google recently added videos in the business listings. You need to have a YouTube account for this, if you don’t already have an account, skip this and worry about it another day. If you do have a business video or YouTube commercial upload it here. This is another way to stay one step ahead of your competition.

Okay, now you are ready to submit and move on to the verification processes. You have two options here. Google can call your business number or mail you a post card. Unless you want to wait 2 to 3 weeks for the mail man, I suggest that you let Google give you a call. Once Google calls, just enter the 4 digit pin and you are all done. Your business won’t be in the directory immediately, but will be in Google’s next update.

Yahoo Business Directory

Yahoo is the easiest business directory to get listed in. Just go to the Yahoo Local page and fill out your business information. The key to getting your small business listed in the right location on Yahoo is to do a little category research. I recommend opening a new page and searching for your competitors. Then copy and paste the list of appropriate categories into your directory listing. Next you need to click on “Additional Information”. It is easy to miss this, but it is important to add depth to your directory listing. That is all that you have to do for now. Yahoo will review the information and let you know when they update their system with your business.

MSN Live Map Directory

For the MSN Live Business Directory, you need to go to MSN’s Local Listing Center and click “add new listing”. Fill in your information and click “check your listing”. Now click continue and sign in or sign up for a Windows Live ID.

Once you are signed in, you can fill out the rest of your business information. One of the tricks of MSN Live is that you can add addition pages to your business listing. These are deep links to pages within your website that you feel customers will want to see. I highly recommend that you add a few descriptive deep links to your website here.

The next step is to select your category. MSN’s Local Listing Center will allow you to add up to six categories. I suggest that you find as many as you can and then click next. Now you should see your business on MSN’s map and be able to review your listing. Double check your map placement and listing and click next. That is all that you have to do for now. The downside to MSN’s Local Listing Center is that they mail a letter to your business address for verification. These letters often take a couple of weeks and look like junk mail. When you do get it in the mail, open the letter and input the verification code to register your business listing.

Registering your business on the local search engines directories can be a bit time consuming, but it is well worth the time. Registering small business websites in local directories is a service that we offer on all of our website design packages.

A friend of mine owns All Pro Painting , which is a commercial painting business in Seattle. You might think that his main goal is to rank number one in Google for the phrase “Seattle Painters”.  After all  “Seattle Painters” is a relatively competitive keyword phrase.  However, the fact is that there are not a lot of people that search for commercial painting companies in Seattle this way. Unfortunately the keyword phrase  “Seattle Painters” is pretty vague. “Seattle Painters could refer to artists, commercial painters, residential home painters, or anything related to painting in the greater Seattle area.

So what is the solution for this painting business to get internet traffic from their website? You guessed it. They need a blog. Blogs do several things for a website. Blogs increase the total number of pages on a website, which means that there are more pages in Google with the potential to rank for any given keyword phrase. Blogs also allow small business to write about what they are actually doing. In this case All Pro Painting isn’t going to want to stuff every blog post with the term “Seattle Painters”. Instead, they should be writing about the various projects that they are working on. For instance, they could be painting the exterior of a home in Fremont. Maybe there were some interesting challenges that they were able to over come on this painting project, or maybe the before an after pictures were so amazing that they really wanted to share them with potential customers. If All Pro Painting continued writing these blog posts on a bi-weekly basis, they would have over 100 blog posts within 12 months. That would mean that All Pro Painting would have over 100 pages in Google that ranked for various search terms related to their business.

You can see in this example how important blogs have become for small businesses to thrive on the internet in their local markets. The days of getting by with a static website have dissolved. Now, you might be thinking of going to WordPress or Blogger to go sign up for a free blog to get started, but your should hold that thought. You are going to be spending a lot of time and effort on your blog and there is no reason that you should be giving this value to someone else. You want to keep your blog on your own businesses website. Keeping your blog within your website will make the blog an extension of your existing website. Your blog URL should look like the following. http://YourBussiness.com/blog. There are also several other factors and tweaks that you are going to want to do to maximize the potential of your blog and overall internet presence, but we can talk about that when you call HDR Web Designs.

Ryan Martin ~ HDR Web Designs

This blog is also a “Do Follow” blog. Yea!!! If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry because you are not alone. Basically a “do” follow blog means that links within your comments and your website link will be followed by Google. You might think that all links are followed by Google, but they are not. In fact, most blogs place “nofollow” tags on all outbound links. By providing dofollow links, I am encouraging comments. However, if you choose to spam this blog in anyway I will ban your IP, so please be kind.

I am also always welcome to taking on guest bloggers, so if anyone has an idea that would like to share I am happy to set you up as an author.

That is all for now, so thank you for visiting and we hope to see you back soon.

Sincerely,

Ryan Martin