Submitted by: Raymondev Lancaster

a Google Places has been creating quite a storm in the online marketing community. I have certainly done my part in calling attention to this major positive cahnge. It’s now relatively easy for a main street business to appear on the first page of Google results for a relevant search in their home town.

It used to be difficult to get smal businesses ranked unless they knew or hired competent Search Engine Optimization help. Now with Google Places pages, there are small businesses showing up in some categories in some areas without even having a web site of their own.

Now every business needs to find their Places page and make sure they claim it. It is simple to do. Search for your business on Google and find your listing. Click on the places tag. Once you’ve clicked on it, go to the top right of the page and you will see that you have either already claimed the page or it will read, “business owner.”

Be sure to fully fill out all the information on your company down to the tiniest detail they ask for. Fully completed forms rank higher in the results than do partially filled in forms. This will make a difference in how many customers you get, so take the time to do it right. Or get someone that knows what they are doing to do it for you.

A claimed and completed form will put you at the head of your class. As of January 2011, it seems that less than 3 percent of all businesses have taken the time to claim their page and fill out the information required. This means you will get a really leg up on them, at least in the short term.

Getting your page claimed and filled out is a critical step. Doing so will help you show up on the Google Map, and you want to be there. Next you want to stay there. To do that you want to also be listed in as many other listing locations as possible. Surprisingly one of the most valuable places to get these citations is on Google competitors, Bing and Yahoo.

Bing and Yahoo are going to send you a fair amount of traffic in their own right, and being listed there helps confirm to Google that you are serious about getting online referrals. Now Google is still king of search engines, but the others still have a solid slice of the market.

Your marketing goal should be to be found everywhere. Today the name of the game from a marketing perspective is to be found everywhere so that people can find you, when they have a need. Some will use Google, others will use another service. What ever they choose, you want to be there.

All across the US and world for that matter, and new day has dawned for local business that will reinvigorate the need for an active online pressence. Again I know as I am one of them. You can do all of this yourself if you want. Your competitors will.

About the Author: The author calls himself the

microbusinessspecialist.com/

. He works with small locally based businesses and helps them to become more “findable” to prospective new customers through the more effective use of internet marketing, and other permission based marketing techniques. He works with bu

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