Update: Google Local Business Center is now known as Google Places

Google has a free tool called Google Local Business Center. We have been evaluating it and believe this will be beneficial for location based businesses as this site allows you to create a free business listing to help your customers find you more easily.

As we understand it, Google Local Business is designed to give more specific, relevant search results for people in their geographic area. When someone performs a search, information about where they are located is transmitted by way of their IP address and their Internet Service Provider (ISP). Google wants to use this location identifying information to return better results about the businesses in the area.

For example, if you search for "charitable organization Chicago" through Google, you will notice a Local Business Result. Through the Google Local Business Center you can register your business as a charitable organization in Chicago so that your organization can too be listed under the local business Center. You can add up to 5 categories for your business.

If you choose to sign up, the website requires verification by either the phone number provided or by mail. If you choose to verify the listing by phone, you will immediately receive a phone call after submitting your request and receive a pin number. You then need to enter the pin number into the website so be sure to be by the phone when filling out the form. If you choose to verify the listing by mail, it will take 2-3 weeks.

If you have a Gmail account, we recommend registering your business when you are logged into Google. This way you can fully take advantage of the dashboard where you can view impressions, actions and top search queries. To read more about the dashboard, please click here.

Adding a blog to your website can be a great way to engage your visitors. You get a chance to write about things you are passionate about and then people coming to your website have a chance to leave their own thoughts and comments. This helps to create a conversation rather than just a declaration of your ideas. The more interesting things you write about the more likely it is that your visitors will turn into fans.

To be sure, a blog takes dedication. You have to be willing to commit to writing new things on a consistent basis. For many people this can quickly become a chore and a burden and eventually their blog becomes stale and irrelevant. But if you could write about different things central to your industry even a couple of times a week you should be able to build up a good collection of articles that will keep your visitors coming back for more.

Content Is King

You hear the phrase all of the time that "Content Is King" which is to mean that the more information and context you can provide the better your chances for improved SEO. But it doesn't help if your website and blog aren't integrated. For example, if you have a website at www.yoursite.com and you have a blog set up on Blogger whose address is yoursite.blogspot.com and all you're doing is linking from your website to your blog then you aren't helping the SEO on your website. They are seen as two separate sites in the eyes of the search engines such as Google and Bing.

Of course the solution to this is to integrate your blog into your website by having Blogger post the articles and comments onto your website. A great example of this is the fan site http://www.ifdfans.com/blog we put together for the Chicago NES Rock band I Fight Dragons. The blog is using Google's Blogger product and then posting the files to the website each time a new story is written. To the visitor it looks like the blog is just another part of the site, fully integrated into the navigation and the design. Visitors can also subscribe to the blog using the RSS feed which they can read in newsreaders such as Google Reader.

A slightly different direction that you can take is to abandon the whole idea of a blog but still make the commitment to writing a couple of articles a week onto your website which will still give you the SEO benefits. This is where having a content management system makes doing this very easy. And now, free services such as Disqus exist which allow you to simply add a small amount of code to any page on your website and then your visitors can leave comments. This is becoming an increasingly more popular way to interact and communicate with visitors and since it's just a small line of code it's completely integrated into the design of the website. In fact, it's such a great way to do it that we've adopted the Disqus commenting system for our website (see below).