1. Claiming and completing your Business Listing
2. Proper Categories for Your Business
3. Include keyword in Business Title
4. Location of business to center of city
5. Keywords in business description.

Now that you know what my top 5 things are for Google local optimization, let me explain the best ways to do this.

• Claiming and your local business listing

You would think that this one would automatically be completed, but there are a massive amount of businesses that have not claimed their local listing.  The biggest problem with this is for the potential competitor to claim the listing for their own.  Secondly, Google will not respect a listing as accurate if it is not claimed and your business information entered.

If you are in a competitive market, you will never see a non-claimed listing as #1 in Local Search.

• Proper Categories for Your Business

Google requires that the first category of your business be one that they suggest.  So you will have to pick from their list. i.e. plumber, dentist, auto mechanic and etc.

The next four categories need to be your Geo-targeted keywords.  i.e. Greenwood Plumber, Greenwood Hair Salon and etc.  Make sure that you have 4 unique keywords that your potential clients are searching.

• Include keywords in the Business Name

This one is actually “against” the Google Terms, but is still showing that it will increase rankings if you do so.  Instead of Katie’s Hair Salon, it would be Katie’s Hair Salon of Orlando.

• Location of Business to City Center

Over the last 6-12 months we have seen a decrease of importance in this main area.  However, the less competitive the market the more important this one can be.  The closest one to the city center can usually outrank the competition if the same amount of Optimization is for each Google Local listing.

• Keywords in the Business Description

When you are detailing all that your business is doing for your neighborhood, make sure that you include your town and city name that you are targeting.  This is a very quick way to optimize your listing.  Make sure that it is readable, and not keyword stuffing.  This is also a way to include more than one town for your listing.  If you service more than one town, include their names in your business description.  You will sometime be listed in more than one town because of this.

Hopefully this gives you a good foundation to build your Google Local Listing.  If you have any questions please email me at david@indianapolisseotraining.com.   We provide both Google Local Optimization services and Training for your business on how YOU can continue to optimize your Google Listing.

Twitter

Most people struggle with trying to combine their SEO Marketing with their Twitter Account to achieve premium SEO results. In fact, most people say that Twitter  in general are useless for SEO organic ranking.

Let me prove how you can have ultimate results!

I will give you this, Twitter does not have link juice. However, because of Twitters extremely high pagerank, and your ability to have your Twitter page achieve a PR of 5 or higher, your tweets and even your Twitter profile page can rank on the first page of Google, with the simple tricks that I will show you below.

I call it…wait for it…THE SEVEN STEPS FOR TWITTER SUCCESS…(that sounded better in my head)

Oh well…moving on.

Step 1. Keyword research.  Find a longtail keyword that you would like to have rank.  Something like “Parrot Cage Set”  With a little research we realize that there are over 60 people a month that are looking for help in making a parrot cage.  There are also a lot of other closely related keywords that could be profitable.

Step 2. Write a Tweet with the keyword phrase in it. Ideally, it should link to a blog post or article of a similar topic for additional traffic.  It would look like “Check out this designer Parrot Cage Set http://www.yourlink.com”

Step 3 Write a 300 word article and post it to Ezinearticles, Articlebase and a couple other article sites using the keyword phrase as an anchor text to your “Parrot Cage Set” tweet.

Step 4 Take your original article and “spin” it into another 300 word article.  With this article create a page on HubPages or a lens on Squidoo with an anchor text backlink to your Tweet.  The more you do the better results that you will have.

Step 5 Social Bookmark everything.  Use Digg, Mixx, Delicious and Propeller to bookmark both your EzineArticles/Articlebase articles and your Hubpages/Squidoo post.

Step 6 The key to success is rapid listing.  The way to accomplish this is to Ping everything.  You will want to ping your actual pages and the RSS feed.  This will result in listings within minutes.

Step 7 Sit back and relax and watch your tweet travel up the SERPS.

This is the best way for you to integrate SEO into your Twitter campaign.