I have been talking on WMR about KML and Sitemaps. The show is mainly about using KML for Local SEO and citations.
OK – it has been almost two weeks ago, but I wanted to share this for the people who missed out. I got the opportunity to talk in the radio show SEO 1on1 on WebmasterRadio.FM on short notice. (Thanks Ross and John!). For those of you who missed it, you can still listen to the show via the podcast! You can download the show by clicking here.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

KML and Sitemaps on SEO 101- WebmasterRadio.FM

David Mihm has been showing off his whiteboard skills over at SEOmoz whiteboard friday. I really want to share these 2 video’s with my readers.

The first video is about Local Search Inclusion:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Local Search Inclusion with David Mihm

The second video is about SEO for Local Search

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – SEO for Local Search

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Inclusion and SEO for Local Search video’s

Yelp, one of the biggest review sites in US is coming to the UK. Hopefully rest of Europe will be next, but will they be able to gain ground? Qype, touchlocal and some other more local oriented players already have quite a strong user base so will Yelp be able to set foot into this continent? If they use the same pro-active approach (by calling people) as in the United States we might be surprised.

Thus, I welcome the news to use Yelp in Europe, both for gathering reviews and citations. It will make a good addition to the list I presented in this post about Local Search Citations in Europe on David Mihm his blog.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Yelp coming to UK, rest of Europe next?

David Mihm, already wrote about citation sources for Local SEO. These citations can help you in your efforts to get better rankings in the SERPS. David contacted me about the guide to international citations he planned to publish and I was happy to do some research in this issue. With a special focus on the (western-) European market I was able to create an overview with some good citation sources for the European market to get things rolling.
You can find my writings on Local Search Citations in Continental Europe as a guest post on David Mihm’s blog.
click here to continue reading

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Citation Sources for Europe

Some of us might know Slideshare, the online platform where you can store your presentation slides to share with the rest of the world. It appears that this website is a valuable source for local citation building. The real value, or the amount of it that might affect your ranking could vary. If your presentation on Slideshare is doing well, even the better. This all may sound a bit fuzzy, but I will try and explain with the following example:

I noticed our Local Business listing for our company was taken down. So I checked the Local Business center and found out it was not suspended, not inactive, it was just nowhere to be found in the search results.
The regular keyphrase I use to see if our business is still there is the company name. Whereas we normally we would be in pole position in the 10pack, we were now in 8th, but with a listing that derived its source from the Slideshare website.
Curious of course, I went to the Slideshare website where one of our presentations from SMX Madrid was listed. One of the slides had the company name and phone numbers listed and apparently was being indexed due to the transcript of the presentation.
The data of the company was blended with the results of Slideshare, causing the URL of Slideshare.net to appear. The information taken from the Slideshare transcript also appeared in the ‘webpages’ tab as one of the citation sources.

So I’m wondering, what is the real value of citation sources? Is it the domain that counts or just the per-page popularity? What is exactly needed to be a citation? In our case it was just the company name and phone number that was enough for Google to blend all our information in ‘the cluster’ with our listing. Please let us know your thoughts or experiences in the comment section!

PS: after entering the Local Business Center and updating our listing with basically no major changes it appeared back, where it should be; on top of the 10pack.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Slideshare as a citation source