Google Local Business Center - 5 Reasons You Must Put the Power of Google Behind Your Local Business

The Google Local Business Center is a tool that enables business owners to more effectively connect with customers searching on Google for information about local business. It puts business owners in control of their business listings and helps them to provide information about their businesses that is authoritative, helpful, and, timely.

The Local Business Center (LBC) is even useful for businesses that do not have Websites as Google's LBC makes it possible for them to use the local business listing as their presence on the Web.
Signing up for an account with the LBC - and adding or claiming your local business listing - should be a top priority for your business for five key reasons:
1- Your Customers and Competitors' Customers Search Google to find Local Businesses
The Google Local Business search engine - which you can find at either local.Google.com or maps.Google.com (maps is, by far, the more popular of the two) - gets an average of more than 50 million unique visitors every month.
That's a lot of people searching every month for, among other things, local businesses to buy from.
And although it's advisable to sign up for local business accounts at Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines, a Google Local Business account should be your immediate priority because Google is the runaway leader in local business search market share, with more than double the local business search market share of maps.yahoo.com, maps.bing.com, and yellow.pages.com combined.
Please note that all links, images and videos can be found on the author's Website - the address for which appears in the Resource Box of this article.

Of course, in spite of Google's best efforts to promote the LBC - and the utilization of maps.Google.com - there are many millions of people who still use the google.com Website, even when searching for local business information. And, as you'll learn in the next section, that gives local businesses an opportunity to capture some space at the top of Google's "traditional" Web search results.
2- A Google Local Business Listing Can Take You to the Top of Google
Google's launch of universal search in May 2007 meant that content from Google Images, Google Local/Maps, Google Video, and so forth could be integrated into its "traditional" Web search results pages.
This means that Google can - and often does - serve up local business listings as part of the Web search results even if location is not specified (it appears that Google's search algorithm is able to detect "local intent").

It's increasingly common to find Google local business listings on the first page of search results - often at the top - as the "Google Local Business Seven-Pack" (a reference, obviously, to the fact that Google displays the top seven local business search results in a cluster of seven).
Alternatively, Google may display a search query box at the top of the search results page that asks searchers: Looking for local results for keyword?
Either way, a Google Local Business listing can put a business on the fast-track to a coveted position at the top of Google's search results that may have been impossible to capture otherwise.
3 - People Who Search Google for Local Businesses Take Action
A Google-sponsored, comScore.com study that looked at the importance of search in influencing offline buying behaviour found that 25% of searchers purchased an item directly related to their search queries, and that, of those buyers, 37% completed their purchases online while an even greater 63% completed their purchases offline following their search activity.
The study results underscore the fact that a Google Local Business listing is not only effective at driving traffic but, more importantly, it is effective at driving traffic that converts.
4 - The Advent of Google Local Search for Mobile

As they continue to become more sophisticated and the browsing experience continues to improve, access to the Internet via mobile phones will continue to rise. In fact, Gartner predicts that access to the Internet via mobile devices will overtake PCs by 2013.
Google has clearly understood for a long time the synergy between local search and the mobile Web, as some key developments suggest:
· Google's July 2005 acquisition of Android Inc, a manufacturer of software for mobile phones (which started triggered speculation that Google was looking to dive into the mobile phone market; the acquisition also eventually led to the development of the Android mobile operating system)
· Google's September 2009 launch of an improved Local Search for Mobile allows users to, among other things, "star" search results on their PCs and have them automatically appear on their mobile phones; it also allows users to search by browsing local business categories without typing (the video on the author's Website offers a brief introduction to the functionality of Google Local Search for Mobile)

· Google's November 2009 $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising company AdMob (on the heels of a five-fold increase in mobile search traffic over the previous two years)
· Google's December 2009 distribution of Favourite Places decals to more 100,000 of the most sought-out and searched US businesses on Google.com and maps.Google.com (see the video on the author's Website for details on Favourite Places)
· Google's January 2010 entry into the mobile phone market that finally ended years of speculation about Google's plans for the mobile phone market
Naturally, Google will continue to innovate in both the local search space and in the mobile web search space. The key takeaway is that the businesses that get on board early will be the ones to reap the greatest rewards. And it all takes to get on board is to visit the Google LBC and claim or add your local business listing.
5 - The Google LBC is Easy to Use and It's Free
If you've already got a Google account, you can simply sign in to the Google LBC and get started right away. If you don't have a Google account, all you have to do is sign up for one (you can sign up on the LBC sign-in page).
The video on the author's Website offers a brief walk through of the easy process for signing into the Google LBC and claiming (or adding) your local business listing.
As Google continues to promote local search, usage of local search by consumers will only increase. And considering that consumers who employ local search are buyers, don't you think that you should sign up for Google's LBC and get your local listing working for your business today?

Dawson Barber invites you to learn more about online marketing and marketing for local businesses by visiting him at his website - Local Business Marketing Solutions - which houses lots of useful information, how-to's, and videos that will help you get the best return on your marketing efforts.

Google Sitemaps: 7 Benefits You Can't Ignore

Google Sitemaps enables Webmasters to Directly Alert Google to Changes and Additions on a Website and that's just one of 7 Benefits.
Telling search engines about new pages or new websites use to be what the submission process was all about. But major search engines stopped using that process a long time ago.
Google has for a long time depended on external links from pages they already know about in order to find new websites.
For webmasters and website owners Google Sitemaps is the most important development since RSS or Blog and Ping, to hit the Internet.

Using RSS and Blog and Ping enabled webmasters to alert the search engines to new additions to their web pages even though that was not the primary purpose of these systems.
If you've ever waited weeks or months to get your web pages found and indexed you'll know how excited we webmasters get when someone discovers a new way to get your web pages found quicker.
Well that new way has just arrived in Google Sitemaps and it's a whole lot simpler than setting up an RSS feed or Blog and Ping. If you haven't heard of Blog and Ping it's a means by which it's possible to alert the search engines to crawl your new website content within a matter of hours.
If you're a webmaster or website owner Google Sitemaps is something you
Can't afford to ignore, even if you're also using RSS and/or Blog and Ping
The reason you should start using Google Sitemaps is that it's designed solely to alert and direct Google Search Engine crawlers to your web pages. RSS and Blog and Ping are indirect methods to alert search engines, but it's not there primary purpose.
It works now, but like most things it's becoming abused. Search Engines will find ways to combat the abuse as they've done with every other form of abuse that's gone before.
Abusing the search engines is a short term not a long term strategy and in some cases certain forms of abuse will get you banned from a search engines index.
You may also be thinking, don't we already have web page meta tags that tell a search engine when to revisit a page. That's true, but the search engine spider still has to find the new page first, before it can read the meta tag. Besides that meta tags are out of favour with many search engines especially Google, because of abuse.

If talk of search engine spiders leaves you confused, they're nothing more than software programs that electronically scour the Internet visiting web sites looking for changes and new pages.
How often the search engine spider alias robot, visits your website depends on how often your site content is updated, or you alert them to a change. Otherwise for a search engine like Google they may only visit a website once a month.
As the internet gets bigger every second of every day, the problem for search engines and webmasters is becoming evidently greater. For the search engines it's taking their search spiders longer to crawl the web for new sites or updates to existing ones.
For the webmaster it's taking longer and becoming more difficult to get web pages found and indexed by the search engines
If you can't get web pages found and indexed by search engines, your pages will never be found in a search and you'll get no visitors from search engines to those pages.
The answer to this problem at least for Google is Google Sitemaps
Whilst still only in a beta phase while Google refines the process, it's fully expected that this system, or one very similar, is here to stay.
Google Sitemaps is clearly a win-win situation
Google wins because it reduces the huge waste of their resources to crawl web sites that have not changed. Webmasters win because they alert Google through Google Sitemaps what changes or new content has been added to a website and direct Google's crawlers to the exact pages.
Google Sitemaps has the potential to speed up the process of discovery and addition of pages to Google's index for any webmaster that uses Google Sitemaps.
Conventional sitemaps have been used by webmasters for quite some time to allow the easier crawling of their websites by the search engine spiders. This type of sitemap is a directory of all pages on the website that the webmaster wants the search engines or visitors to find.

Without sitemaps a webmaster runs the risk of webpage's being difficult to find by the search engine crawlers, or never being found at all.
Do I need Google Sitemaps if I already have sitemaps on my websites?
Google Sitemaps are different to conventional sitemaps because they're only seen by the Search Engine Spiders and not human visitors. Google Sitemaps also contain information that's only of value to the search engine in a format they understand.
Creating Google Sitemaps in 5 steps
1. Create Google Sitemaps in a supported format ( see end of article )
2. Upload Google Sitemaps to your Web Hosting space
3. Register for a free Google Account if you don't already have one
4. Login to your Google Sitemaps Account and submit the location of your sitemaps
5. Update your Sitemaps when your site changes and Resubmit it to Google
From your Google Sitemaps account you can also see when your sitemap was last updated and when Google downloaded it for processing. It will also tell you if there were any problems found with your sitemaps.

Google Sitemaps can be used with commercial or non-commercial websites, those with a single webpage, through to sites with millions of constantly updated pages. However a single Google Sitemaps file is limited to 50,000 web pages. For websites with more pages, another Google Sitemaps file must be created for each block of 50,000 pages.
If you want Google to crawl more of your pages and alert them when content on your site changes, you should be using Google Sitemaps. The other added benefit is it's free.
If you're expecting this special alert process with Google Sitemaps to improve your Page Rank, change the way Google ranks your web pages, or in any way guarantee inclusion of your web pages, Google has made it clear it will make no difference.
Google Sitemaps web pages are still subject to the same rules as non Google Sitemaps pages.
If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, Google Sitemaps will allow spiders to know what URLs are available and how often page content changes.
Google has said that Google Sitemaps is not a replacement for the normal crawling of web pages and websites as that will continue in the conventional way. Google Sitemaps does however allow the search engine to do a better job of crawling your site.
The Google Sitemap Protocol is an XML file containing a list of the URLs on a site. It also tells the search engine when each page was last updated, how often each page changes and how important each page is in relation to other web pages in the site.
Google Sitemaps 7 Benefits You Can't Ignore
1. Alert Google to Changes and Additions to your Website Anytime You Want
2. Your Website is crawled more Efficiently and Effectively
3. Web Pages are Categorized and Prioritized exactly How You Want
4. Speed up the process of New Website and New Web Page Discovery
5. No Waiting and Guessing to see when Spiders crawl your web pages
6. Google Sitemaps is likely to set the standard for Webpage Submission and Update Notification which will extend the benefits to other Search Engines
7. The Google Sitemaps service is Free
Exactly how to create a Google Sitemaps file to upload to your website is in the continuing part of this article in Google Sitemaps.

Tony Simpson is a Web Designer and Search Engine Optimizer who brings a touch of reality to building a Web Business. It's a No-Hype, No B.S approach from his own 5 year experience. He provides advice, product reviews and products at Web Page Add Ons to Make Automation of Your Web Site Work for You.