Home Business Tips:

Local Businesses Should Use Google Local Business Center

As part of my website design and SEO I always initiate Google's Local Business Center for the companies that I am designing for. The reason is simple, it works. It's the fastest way to get business for your business in the local market. Let's say you have a bicycle shop that specializes in trail, mountain and recumbent bikes. List your site with Google's Local Business Center and you immediately have a listing showing your potential customer base exactly where you are located (Google Maps) supplying your address phone and map to your store. You can include coupons and other items as well and Google supplies performance data as well.

You can also use Yahoo's service under local.yahoo.com to get even more exposure. Doing small off-page seo is important in the entire seo process. Of course you need to include a listing with Google Webmaster tools and have a Google Analytics account as well to round out the free and quick options. All of these items are equally important in the search engine ranking process of which there is much more to getting high search ranking for specific keywords, but they are all components that complete the entire process.