When you search for a local  business in your area, you may have noticed that Google often shows a map of your local area along with a list of businesses in that area.

For example, if I am looking for restaurants in Edinburgh (where I live) and enter “Edinburgh Restaurants” into Google, the first thing I see after the sponsored ads is the map.

You can see that the map is right at the top of the listings and there are 7 businesses listed. Clicking on the link below these businesses will show more listings.

If you have been wondering how to add your business to Google Maps, you will be pleased to know this this is very easy to do and it is also completely free. You can also do this regardless of whether or not you have a website.

For this to work you really need to either have a physical business like a shop or a restaurant, or an office, or if you are running a home business you need to be happy to add your home address and telephone number into your listing. You do have the option of hiding the address so that it is not displayed on your listing, but this may mean that your listing is ranked as highly as it would be with an address.

Here are the steps to add your business to Google Maps:

1) Visit the Add your Business page.

2) Sign in with your Google account, or create a new account if you don’t have one.

3) Click the button to add your listing

4) Fill in your details – this includes your address, website URL (optional), telephone number, email address and business description

5) You then have the option of adding photos, opening hours, payment option, videos and more.

6) Finally, before your listing goes live you need to verify your listing. This can be done by phone, SMS or postcard.

That’s it – very easy to do! If you have your own business you need to make sure that you do this asap to increase your visibility.

To improve the ranking of your Google Places listing you should make sure that:

• You have claimed your listing.
• You have verified your listing.
• You have filled out your profile with as much relevant information as possible.
• You have the correct categories selected
• You include your main keywords in your listing. (but don’t over do it and keyword stuff!)

I often get asked the question “How long does it take to rank well in the search engines?” Unfortunately his is one of these questions with the answer “it depends“!

There are so many factors that are taken into account by search engines when they rank other websites including:

• On page optimization – in particular the TITLE tag and the keywords throughout the body of the page
• How many backlinks are pointing to the site
• The quality of the backlinks pointing to the site
• The keywords contained within the anchor text of your backlinks
• The age of your domain

These are just a few of the factors, but it gives you an idea of why this question is not so easy to answer.

Regardless of this, before you embark on an SEO campaign it makes sense for you to have in mind a timescale. Like all goals, it is good to be specific about the results that you want to achieve and the time frame that you want to achieve them in. For example “I want to be in the top 3 sites in Google for keyword phrase xyz and abc withn 4 months”.

Before you set yourself a goal, you need to make sure it is realistic. The best way to do this in my opinion is to check out your competition. You’ll probably already have a couple of keyword phrases in mind, so you need to take each keyword individually and do the following:

1) Go to Google and enter your keyword in the search box without quotes

2) You’ll see a number of website pages returned in the results. Don’t freak out if this number is high – although it is typical for more competitive terms to have a higher number of pages returned in the results, you are only really competing with the sites that are on the first page. If you can beat them, you are at the top.

3) Take a note of the domain names of the top 3 websites and use a backlink checking tool to see how many backlinks they have.

4) Compare the number of backlinks that these sites have with the number of backlinks that your own site has. This will give you a rough indication of how long it is likely to take you to beat your competition. For example if your site has 300 backlinks and the number one site has 2000 backlinks, you need to work out roughly how long it will take you to exceed 2000 backlinks. Bear in mind that this is a rough indication only as the quality of the backlinks also plays a large factor in ranking.

5) Take a closer look at the sites you are competing with. If you are trying to rank your home page and you are competing against a site that has a sub page or blog page ranked, it should be easier to beat them. If the site you are competing with does not have the keywords in the TITLE tag or mentioned throughout the page it may also be easier to beat them.

Although there is not an exact  scientific answer for the question how long does it take to rank well in the search engines, hopfully these steps will help to give you an idea of the length of time it takes.

You may have to repeat this process a few times until you find a keyword that allows you to acheive a good ranking in as short a time as possible.

You can find more tips like this in my SEO EBook – 3 Steps to Search Engine Success.

I don’t like to get too techie in my posts, but a lot of people ask the question “what is a robots.txt file” or want to know how to create a robots.txt file.

First, don’t worry ifyou don’t have a robots.txt file on your web server – it is not mandatory and if you don’t want to prevent any pages from being indexed by the search engines you don’t actually need one

A robots.txt file is simply a text file that’s created with notepad or any other compatible text editor. You use this file to list pages or directories on your website that you do not want the search engine spiders to crawl (i.e. pages that you do not want to be indexed in the search engines).

The reason for this could be because you want to keep your download pages from showing up in the search engine results (SERPS), or because you don’t want to show duplicate content on your site.

Even if you don’t have any web pages that you do not want to show up in the SERPS you can still upload a robots.txt file to your site to let the search engines know that you’re playing by the rules!

Here is how to create a robots.txt  file.  These files are actually very simply to make despite the name!

First simply open notepad or your favorite text editor.  This lines you will enter in this text file are as follows:

User-Agent: [Spider or Bot name]
Disallow: [Directory or file name]

It’s pretty much self explanatory; you tell which spider, i.e. Google, MSN or Yahoo not to crawl the “Disallow” listed sites. That’s all to it, too easy right?

Let me give you a few examples so you know exactly how this should look when you create your robots.txt file.

Let’s say you DO NOT want the Google bots (spiders) from crawling a particular directory on your site. This is how it would look:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /downloads

If you want to allow the search engines to index everything on your site and just want to have the robots.txt file on your site for good measures. This is how it would look:

User-Agent: *
Disallow:

Hopefully this will make it clearer to you how to create a robots.txt file!

If you are trying to optimize your website for the search engines it can be very easy to make mistakes, especially if you are new to SEO. I think the easiest way to learn how to optimize your website properly is to look at some common seo mistakes and learn from them. It is always much easier to avoid making mistakes when you know what the most common mistakes are!

1) Ignoring the TITLE Tag
Leaving out your title tag is another common mistake that is also made by the experts. This is the most important area of your SEO to have your keyword. This will show up as the title of your website in the search engines.

2) Using a Flash Website that Does Not Contain HTML
A flash website may appear appealing to you but it is not always appealing to users and search engines cannot always rank them properly. If you still prefer to use a flash website be sure that you include an HTML version of the site.

3) Concentrating Too Much on Meta Tags
Apart from the description meta tag, most search engines pretty much ignore the meta tags. They have been abused in the past and are no longer a reliable way of ranking websites. I see too many people get hung up on their “meta keywords” tag when they should be concentrating on the content of their site and the backlinks.

4) Using Java Script Menus
Search engines do not recognize Java Scripts so you should not use these as the sole method of navigation.  If you do happen to have certain portions of your website that do contain Java Script be sure to create a site map as well to allow the search engines to index all your pages.

5) Not Mentioning Your Keywords Enough
I’ve seen many people try to optimize a web page and only mention the keyword in the TITLE and in the meta tags. You must mention the keyword in the body of the page as well – a few times including at the beginning, middle and end of the page is good, but be careful not to overdo it.

6) Ignoring Your URLs
When you create additional pages on your site be sure to use the target keywords for that page in the filename.

7) Targeting the Wrong Keywords
This is the one of the most common SEO mistakes. Before you decide on your keywords be sure to do some research so you can be sure that people are actually searching on these keywords AND they convert well. Also check out the competition and make sure you have a chance of ranking on the first page of the search engines.

Hopefully you can learn from some of these common SEO mistakes and get your site ranked well in the search engines!

You may or may not have heard of Black Hat SEO, but it is important to understand a bit about this so you can be sure to steer clear of Black Hat SEO Tricks and avoid your website being penalized!

Black hat SEO is an unethical way for a webmaster to get their website to appear higher in the  search engine results (SERPS) than it really should. This may sound like a good thing to you, but in almost all cases, this higher rank in the search engines will be a temporary thing, and the website will very often end up in a much worse position in the long term (or perhaps be completely removed from the SERPS)

These black hat SEO tricks will usually have some of the following characteristics.

• It will break search engine rules and regulations.
• It will unethically present content in both visual and non visual to the search engine web crawlers.
• It will create a bad user experience.

Penalties for using black hat SEO tricks can be extremely harsh and include but not limited to banning from all search engines. There are ways to avoid creating a black hat website and if you follow them correctly will save you a lot of problems in the future.

1. Do not stuff your keywords

Using a lot of keywords in your site and nothing else will get you in hot water with the search engines. You need to learn how to place your keywords properly to avoid this. If you fluff your articles with a lot of keywords yes, it will increase your chances of ranking higher on the search engine but only temporarily.

2. Avoid using invisible text

Invisible text consists of putting keywords into your site where the text is the same color as the background e.g. white text with a white background. This text is hidden from the customer but can be detected by the search engine crawlers.

3. Avoid Cloaking

Cloaking means that you show one page to the search engines and a completely different one to your visitors. One example of doing this is by using the “iframe” code within your page.

4. Do not use doorway pages

A doorway page is literally just a fake page that is used to attract the web crawlers. The customers themselves will never see this page. This doorway will trick the web crawler to rank your business higher but again, this will only be temporary.

If you wish to run a legitimate business you need to avoid black hat SEO techniques  because they will taint your company in the long run. Run your business right and do not fall into the unethical practice of running a black hat SEO website.

In this post I’m going to talk a bit about social bookmarking and SEO. A lot of people ask me whether or not social bookmarking can help your search engine rankings and the answer to this question is “yes”, but only if you do it correctly.

Social bookmarking is defined by Wikipedia as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet. If you have ever posted your link to one of your blog articles with Digg you have social bookmarked it.

Social Bookmarking has a number of SEO advantages:

• You may get a backlink when you bookmark a page on your site (I say “may” because some bookmarking sites use “nofollow” in their backlinks).
• Bookmarking a new page or a new blog post on your site can help get that page indexed in the search engines quickly.
• Most social bookmarking sites allow you to use tags. You can list your target keywords in these tags and this can help your ranking for these keywords

It is very easy to bookmark your blog articles or web pages to multiple social directories with one click. For example OnlyWire allows you to join over 30 social bookmarking services and then bookmark your blog article or web page by logging into your account and posting your title, description and tag keywords.

OnlyWire is free and a good tool but most of the services included use “nofollow” which means that your backlink won’t count in most cases. If you are serious about social bookmarking for the purpose of building backlinks you may want to use software like Social Bookmarking Demon instead. This software allows you to bookmark at up to 100 social bookmarking sites and has lots of randomization and scheduling features built in.

When you write a new blog article or web page and bookmark it you can also help yourself out by utilizing some basic SEO techniques.

To keep it simple what you want to do is choose a specific keyword phrase for the article you write about. If you target longtail keyword phrases, which are phrases of three or more words, you increase the odds of ranking higher on the search engines as these longer keyword phrases tend to be less competitive.

The easy way to set this up is to include your keyword phrase in the title of your blog post. You should then also include it in the first and last paragraphs of the article before you publish it.

When you go to bookmark the article you want to tag it around that keyword phrase. You should include those again in the title and in the description for additional emphasis.

If you are doing a lot of bookmarking you should be very careful not to just bookmark your own websites. If you do this there is a chance that you will be detected as a “self promoter” and one or more of your accounts could be closed. The best way to avoid this is to regularly bookmark other websites as you surf throughout the day. Or use a software such as Social Bookmarking Demon with built in randomization.

Search engines spider large social sites such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Simpy and others multiple times per day. By bookmarking your article in these directories you are creating valuable back links to the new pages on your site and you have a chance of receiving visitors from these social sites (expecially if your post is interesting or controversial and other people bookmark it).

If you follow these tips for social bookmarking and SEO you will see a greater return for your efforts in terms of search engine rankings and traffic.

Remember when working on your SEO that it pays to spend a good amount of time concentrating on your home page and researching the keywords for it. However, you shouldn’t stop there…

Here is my strategy for multiplying my traffic. I get so much more traffic from my sub pages than I do from my home page.

At least once per week I do the following:

(1) Choose a topic

(2) Research keywords for that topic. I am currently using Wordtracker to shortlist my keywords and the Google keyword tool to check the search volume.

(3) Find a good keyword phrase. I want something that has at least a couple of hundred searches a month, but not too much competition. The keyword needs to be less competitive than the one for my home page.

(4) Create a page about that topic and include the keywords in the filename, the <TITLE>, the <H1> tag, throughout the body, in the alt attributes and so on. If you don’t know how to create a new page on your site, a blog post will do. Put the keywords in the blog title and 2-3 times throughout the blog post. Monetize the page with a link or information about your product or service, or at least one affiliate program, or adsense, or a newsletter optin.

(5) Link to that page from at least one other place on your site e.g. home page, blog or menu. I usually link from the home page and one of my sub menus.

(6) Social bookmark the page.

(7) Write an article about that same topic, but make it different from the page that you added. I post my article using Submit Your Article with article leverage. In half the resource boxes I use only a deep link to this new page and in the other half I include both a link to my home page and a deep link. I put my keywords in the anchor text too.

(8) Repeat for a new page…

This technique works better than trying to squeeze lots and lots of keywords into your home page.

Many people want to know “how do I submit my site to a search engine?” and some people even go on to purchase services which will submit their website to a search engine on a monthly basis (for a monthly fee of course). If you are one of these people I have three words for you…. “Don’t do it!”.

Read on and learn a little bit more about the search engines and how they work before going off and paying for some search engine submission service that will probably do absolutely nothing for you apart from cost you money.

First of all, the main search engines are:

• Google (approx 69% of the searches)
• Yahoo (approx 19% of the searches)
• MSN (approx 8% of the searches)

None of these search engines require you to submit your website to them.

Why not…? The reason is that these search engines find websites by themselves without the need for anyone to submit them. All of these search engines have software programs known as “spiders” which basically go and visit  (crawl) different websites on the internet, following links on each of these website, which lead to other websites, which lead to more websites and so on.

All you need to do to get your website indexed by a search engine is to get some backlinks to your website. A backlink is simply a live link from one website to your website. There are many easy ways to do this including distributing articles with your resource box in them containing a link to your site, submitting your site to online directories, exchanging links with other websites, distributing an online press release and more.

Once you have been indexed by a search engine there is absolutely no need to submit your website to them once, never mind every single month. Submitting your site to search engines won’t do you any harm (apart from wasting your time or money), but it is not going to do you any good either.

So if you have already started a search engine submission campaign I recommend that you stop immediately and spend your time or money on building good quality backlinks to your website instead.

I hope that answers the common question of “how do I submit my site to a search engine”. The short answer is, “you don’t”.

However, submitting your site to manually edited link directories such as Yahoo Dir and Dmoz is a completely different thing. This will benefit your site and it is a worthwhile exercise.