Offliners: Any Idea How Google Ranks their Local Listings?

Check out David Mihm's stuff on Local Search Ranking Factors. It's awesome.

Local Search Ranking Factors | Google & Yahoo Local SEO Best Practices

Citations will help immensely.

Sorry, but what is a Citation? I am total newbee when it comes to local listings

A citation is a "mention" of your business on other websites like directories, yellow pages, and any site that has a local focus.

Here's a great resource from OutspokenMedia: Small Business SEO: How To Launch That Web site

Lisa's list of sites to get "citations":

https://my.superpages.com/spweb/prod...siness-listing
https://selfenroll.citysearch.com/
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http://www.openlist.com/update/
http://www.yelp.com/

I'd also suggest completely filling out the local listing. Put pictures in, a youtube video, and so forth. I even create coupons for my customers (If they don't have a coupon, I just take a picture of something on their site that emphasizes something they do).

Even just claiming your listing will help immensely. I've noticed that it is easier for a longer-established business to grab a top listing.

Matt

My most useful tip is to optimize every title (blog post and pages titles), all images (on site and in GP and other sites that allow images), videos, with the keyword (or product name, service) you are targeting followed by - your business - your city,state

Hint: If you use the All In One SEO plugin or similar plugins for wordpress just add your business name, city, state in the titles and then every time you create a post or page this will be added to the end of every title after a | seperator.

I tested this theory out on youtube with my video titles and it only took 5 minutes to take the top 5 spots (5 different videos) in the google video search results. And this was after the videos were posted a couple weeks ago. I went in and changed/optimized the titles like my recommendation above, 5 minutes later I took over the top 5 search results for videos and #2 and #3 organic results plus 3 other top 10 spots. I mean the results showed up without pinging, indexing or anything.


So far 12-14 images in the image search results, A Spot in Google Places, #1 for blog search results, and 5 of the top 10 organic search results out of 2.3 million results.


This goes to show the power of Google's focus on returning relevant local results. I am a one man web consulting business while most of my competitors are medium to large web consulting companies. They are supposed to know better right?

Don't neglect the off-site links. I work with a lot of local search sites and keyword anchored backlinks work for me every time.

I create backlinks with all combinations (keyword city, keyword state, keyword city st, keyword city state) starting with the main city/region for the business and working down to smaller cities and regions in the area. I sometimes have 200 to 500+ keywords in rotation.

If you are focused on Places then get Offline Bully. Their step by step process is really stellar. Also, many of the processes and suggestions will work great for image and video SEO. Very good stuff.