For the third year in a row, David Mihm has published the Local Search Ranking Factors. The LSRF 2010 consists of 32 local search enthusiasts their opinion (including me!) on how to rank well in the search engines. It is a definite must read for everyone interested in Local Search. It is also incredible to see how much has happened in the past year in the Local Search business and how a small community of enthusiastic people (and SEO’s ) are willing to share the ins and outs on the matter.

Top 10 take aways from the Local Search Ranking Factors are (thx Andrew ) :

1. Claiming your Google Place Page/Local Listing
2. Have a Business Address in the City That is Being Searched
3. Associate Your Google Place Page with the Proper Categories
4. Put Your Product/Service Keyword in Your Place Page Business Title
5. Proximity of Your Address to the Searched City’s Centroid
6. Product/Service Keywords in your Google Place Pages Description
7. Associating Photos with your Google Place Page
8. Associating Local Area Code with your Primary Place Page Phone Number
9. Associating Place Page with Marginally Related Categories
10. Location Keyword in Place Pages Business Title

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Ranking Factors 2010

Historypin is some sort of timetravel device. You can now look up historical imagery inside a Google Maps interface using historypin. I think its cool to see how your town looked like in the old days, maybe before you were even born. See those old horse trams riding down the streets before Prius’ were dominating the road.

Historypin shows how street view can be used in alternate ways. Add your own imagery and share it with the world. Help historypin become the largest database of historical data.
I love to see how this program works out and how soon the netherlands will be mapped with historical images. I bet my parents have some real old pictures kept in a box somewhere. Let’s take the trip down memory lane and start uploading those images.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Travel through London’s past with Historypin (google-latlong.blogspot.com)

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Historypin: building largest historical image archive

Never seen this one before but I think it’s brilliant and wanted to share it with my readers!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google StreetView Explained (Japanese version)

Following Mike’s example of Google still showing oneboxes on SEO related terms (which they banished some time ago ) I found another example where google decides to put up the onebox. Considering the Guidelines for inclusion in Google Maps you might find this example particularly funny.


or check out this one on webdesign and positioning in Google

It appears that a lot of this still possible in many countries! Google should be proactively stating at the submission process what can and what can’t be done according to the Google Guidelines.
Have you seen more interesting examples?

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

SEO oneboxes – not only in Duluth

Google Maps has just announced that they launched a beta verison of Turn by Turn navigation software for the Android 2.0 platform!

Features highlighted are :

• Search in plain English
• Search by Voice
• Traffic view
• Search along route
• Satellite view
• Street View
• Car dock mode

The first phone to be supporting the application will be the motorola droid. More info in the video!

via: mashable

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Maps Turn-by-Turn navigation for android 2.0

Saw this one over at Mike’s blog and found it funny enough to share with you people.

Must be one hell of a job!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Collecting Street View data

I just noticed that Google has a actual frontend for Google Coupons. I was used to see Coupons being displayed alongside local business listings in Google Maps and the regular SERPS and you could search for them via Google Maps.

To me this appears to be new but Mike Blumenthal already reported a Coupon search interface back in 2007. The search for coupons appears to have its own top URL now on the Google domain (although it is not yet available in their sitemap ) . It looks like this is yet another effort by Google raising visibility for coupons. I wonder if this will attract more business owners to get their business listed and add coupons when appropriate.

PS: It is also good to see coupons being visible/available here in the Netherlands. Google’s feature’s are mostly implemented somewhat later in Europe than in the US.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Coupons near you

Google has added extra visuals in the map data to show where specific points of interests and landmarks are. Libraries, museums, pharmacies, restaurants, shops and all kinds of other places are now easily recognizable by embedded visuals in map data.
A negative side-effect of the feature is that a map can get a bit crowded. Big markers, small markers, points of interests, public transportation items..Although usefull many of the times, they all seem to clutter op the map more and more.
To me the interesting part is how a specific place is being interpreted as a relevant Point of Interest and how to get yourself a nice visual embedded in that map data.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Maps visuals added

The Google Maps team on twitter just notified their followers that they were handing out these:

Paper Google Maps with Public Transport information on the back.

It appears that this also must be an addition to the marketing campaign they are running for Google Maps as a product.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Paper Google Maps handed out by volunteers

It has been a while since we have seen some major interface changes to Google Maps. Today I noticed some of the following changes and wondered for how long they have already been there.

update: i was a bit behind on my reader and noticed Matt posted about this on SEL as well

I did some searches for company names inside Google Maps and found out that google was saving my previous searches and storing the markers in seperate colors inside a new part of the interface (something they call the rv_panel / revision panel?) as the screenshots below will show.

Apart from this I also noticed a ‘zoom level specifier’ in text-view mode but was unable to reproduce it in order to make a screenshot. The ‘zoom level specifier’ was shown alongside the small map in textview and  had numeric values of the zoomlevel with labels ‘street’, ‘place’ , etc to identify its zoom level depth. Let me know if some of you people have seen this experiment and please send me a screenshot

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Recent interface changes to Google Maps