And now having a Places page is more important than ever, because whenever someone does a “local search” on Google – meaning they add the name of a place in addition to the type of business they are looking for (e.g. “pizza new york” “graphic design jerusalem”), Google often merges these Places pages into the traditional Google results. So even if you would never make it onto the first page otherwise, if your Places business page is among the first in the Google Places results, it may end up on the first page here.

But when Google creates it for you, it is “unclaimed.”  Even in the countries where Google lets you edit unclaimed listings, your additions won’t have the authority of “added by owner.”  Additionally, if you don’t claim it, someone else with a little effort could claim it instead, even if they’re not the true owner, making it impossible for you to claim it.

In some countries, claiming an unclaimed Google Places page is very easy.  The United States, England, Argentina and Malaysia are some examples.  Here’s what a claimed listing looks like:

And here’s an unclaimed listing:

So claiming this is simple: You click on “Business owner?” You will need to sign in with a Google Account (an email that you already use with some Google product).  If you don’t have one, you will need to create one.  You will then be given the following options:

For any of these options, you will have to validate that you are really the business owner.  To do that, Google will send you a PIN by either calling the phone number listed on the Places page, sending an SMS to the cell phone number listed on the Places page, or by postcard to the address listed on the page.  You then enter the PIN into the validation webpage, and voila – the business is yours. Add as much information as could be helpful.  Add photos.  Make sure the category is correct.  Ask your customers to write reviews.

The other way to claim your business is to use Google Places “telephone lookup”.  Pick your country, type in your business phone number, and if your phone number matches a business listing, they’ll give you the option to claim it.  If it doesn’t, they’ll give you the option to create a new listing.

Now this is all fine and dandy if you live in a place where Google provides this option.  But what if you live in a place like Israel, or Turkey, where this is what a claimed listing looks like:

And this is what an unclaimed listing looks like:

Wait – it gets worse.  I’ll just use the telephone lookup, you think. And Israel is an option in the drop down menu of countries, so obviously that should work. (We’re not even talking about countries like Bolivia, that aren’t an option in the menu. How they get on Google Places is another story altogether.)

But when I put in the above number, in the format it tells me to: 03-566-1134 – Google tells me:

But wait – Google! You have a page with that number!  What do you mean, “no address found”?  Maybe I’ll try inputting the phone number in different ways, like with the country code, even though that’s not the format you specified.  Hmm – still doesn’t work.  How do I claim my business on Google Places?

Well – that’s the bad news.  As of now, it seems like you can’t. We recently went through this with a client, and no amount of asking on SEO forums or Google Places help forums turned up any answer.  If you actually “add your information below”, and go through the verification process as mentioned above, you will end up with your own brand-new owner verified Google Places page for your business. But the original?  The one that has all the reviews?  The one that is outranking the new one on a Google search? Untouchable.

For our client, we decided to start a new Google Places page.  There were address issues with his other existing pages, and we’re hoping that if we change the addresses in the sources from which the reviews came from to the address on the new page, eventually Google will redirect the reviews over to the new page. We’re going to see – this is apparently uncharted territory in Israel, from the silences in the SEO forums.  We’ll keep you posted on our experiences – and if one day Google updates their Google Places Israel support so that you can actually claim your page, we’ll let you know.  If you want to make sure to get these Google Places updates, you can subscribe to this blog by email or by feed reader. Looking forward to sharing more Google Places tips – including tips for getting your Places business page to rank higher!

Update: after a few months, the new Google Places page did start ranking, and pushed the other pages off the map (yes, pun intended).  So all’s well that ends well, but we still hope Google will make it a little easier in the future.

How Do I Claim My Business on Google? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

Let’s take a look at the search results for a few vastly different searches. The following all had videos show up in the first page of the results:

eat pizza

water slide

puppy dogs (from last time)

building a computer

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, YouTube dominates the video search results, which makes sense, seeing as YouTube is the largest video hosting site on the web, in addition to being a Google property.  There are a few other video sites coming in here also – metacafe, todaysbigthing. I have to say this actually surprised me, as in previous searches I’ve usually noticed almost exclusively YouTube results, but when trying to get a few screenshots for this blog post, I came across more varied results than I expected.  I still didn’t see too many small, non-video-hosting sites coming up, though, which might lead you to the following question:

Where do I host my video so that it will bring me the most benefit?

On the one hand, if I host it on my own site, is Google ever going to rank it? And do I have the space on my server to host as much video as I want?

On the other, if I host it on YouTube (or some other video site) and then embed it on my site, there’s no limit to how much video I can host there, and it seems like plenty of people might see my video - but the video search listing will send them to YouTube and my whole goal here is to increase the organic traffic for this keyword to my site.

Dilemma.  

But it could be that you can have the best of both worlds. Google has recently been trying to push video content producers to submit video sitemaps.  They had a webinar several months ago about video sitemaps, and about two months ago published all the Q & A from the webinar. The Google staff tells us pretty clearly that even if you host your videos on a third-party site such as YouTube, your own site can rank for them if you have an embedded player on site, as long as you submit a video sitemap that tells Google where those videos are on your site.

ReelSEO, an SEO firm that specializes in video optimization, has a helpful article written about six months ago describing how he got his embedded Vimeo videos indexed and ranked with video sitemaps. He mentions that he’s working on a specific guide to YouTube, and working together with Google on it, because just the video sitemap doesn’t seem to be enough without special hacks, but when questioned about it in the comments about two months ago, he said he’s still waiting to hear back from Google about progress.

So you want to try to get your videos ranking? Check out the Google guidelines to video sitemaps to put up your own sitemap and beat the crowd of competitors for the regular search engine results by jumping above it with video results.

How likely is it that you’re going to make it to those two coveted video spots? That’s the question… If there are no videos in Universal Search for your keyword, and you can make a highly relevant, visible video, well-optimized for the keyword, maybe Google will decide it’s worth having video search there. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, when asked about this, recommended being an early adopter. You never know what new things will work well, but if they do work, you’re miles ahead of the competition. If there are already videos when you do the search, you’re going to have to analyze the competition.  Can you beat those two videos? How well are they optimized? Are the guidelines for video optimization similar to regular SEO or are the factors totally different? We’re still looking into this, and we’ll be happy to update you when we have more clarity, but if you have any experiences and thoughts on the matter, it would be great to hear your opinion.

Good luck!

Video Sitemaps for SEO is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

While doing keyword research for a client building a site which includes games for kids, I spent some time reviewing the full list of potential keywords I had amassed around the topic of “kids games online”.  Of the over 500 keyphrases I had in the list, the primary words that jumped out again and again were “free” and “fun” – free online games for kids, free kids online games, fun games for kids online, free virtual worlds for kids…  Now, it makes sense that those words would appear; after all, I had indicated them when starting to build the list.  But I had also included the word “safe.”  In my list of 500+ words, the word “safe” appeared 14 times.  Most of them at the very bottom of the list with very few searches.  5 of which Google claimed had no searches whatsoever.

You could say that the majority of searchers here are the children and not the parents, and what child cares about “safe”?  True – I don’t have demographics for the numbers.  But that the proportion of parents who are looking for games for their children (especially when you see that plenty of phrases state that the searcher is looking for games for “young kids” “preschool” “under 6″) is that low?

What are our priorities when looking for online entertainment for our children?  That it be fun?  That it be free?  Or that it be safe?

And what sort of games are we looking for – or are our children looking for when we’re not around?  True, there were plenty of “learning” and “educational” searches (we can probably guess what demographic was searching for those).  There were “disney” and “spongebob” and “virtual pets” and “train” game searches (all nice and innocuous).  There were “cooking” and “typing” and “surgery” (good way to learn new skills).  There were also searches for shooting games (maybe not the most educational, but it’s debatable whether violent games cause violent behavior) and 260 estimated searches by Google for “love games for kids online”.  Virtual boyfriends and girlfriends?  I didn’t bother to check what came up on a Google search.

There are a lot of entertainment options for our children out there.  Fun?  Free?  If it’s being billed as a game for kids, it probably is.

Safe?

Who’s checking?

Who’s Entertaining Our Children? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

Did they come for the sessions?  The networking with others in the industry?  The  constantly changing array of warming trays and platters containing tempting culinary experiences?  If only they had installed Google Analytics on SphinnCon Israel 2010, we might be able to find out.

Analytics was the topic of one of the sessions, which covered the range of the search engine profession from SEO to SEM to Social Media.  The following are some of the actionable takeaways from the sessions I attended:

A/B Split Testing for Adwords from Dan Perach of PPCPROZ (a very professional, well-presented and practical presentation):

• while A/B testing can help your performance tremendously, if you don’t have time to be on top of an A/B test – don’t  (simple, seemingly obvious, but overlooked – and definitely applicable to other areas of life as well).
• when you’re starting a new test in the Search Network, make sure you pause your old ad, clone it and start a new test – or the past history will skew the results.
• be on top of your tests to know as soon as possible after a test is really over (with a winner or a dead heat) – otherwise you’ll end up losing money to losing ads.  If you have many ads being tested, use a tool to manage the tests and tell you algorithmically when the test is over.
• matrix the competition – use a competitive research tool like Keyword Spy to look at the top ads for each keyword or adgroup.  Make a chart with the unique feature or benefit each one gives, the call to action, the tone – and then see how you can differentiate your ads from the competition.

Content Network Tips from Naomi Sela of Compucall:

• optimize by predefining: themes and site lists where you think your ad will succeed.
• optimize by refining: exclude sites, categories and page types if you see they aren’t bringing you the traffic you want; exclude demographic segments or bid more for a particular age or gender.
• use a placement performance report to identify your highest converting sites, and then create specific ad copy for those sites.
• target users who visit sites out of their country (for example, target sites in English, Russian and Arabic – but for visitors with an Israeli IP).

SEO Indexing Tips from Vanessa Fox (no, not the name of a session, but a few tips from a site clinic that she directed):

• the most accurate way to see how many pages of your site have been indexed by Google is by uploading an XML sitemap to Webmaster Tools – and letting them tell you there how many pages they’ve indexed.  Using the “site:” command is relatively inaccurate (as anyone who has paged to the end knows), and wildly inaccurate for numbers over 1000.
• if you have a directory site and some of the categories may not have listings, you should programmatically create a single page that will show for any request for which there is no content, otherwise Google may end up indexing lots of pages with different URLs that all say “0 results found” and eventually decide that your site has little worthwhile content. You may not be too happy with the results of that decision.

Thanks to all the presenters and organizers!

SphinnCon Israel 2010 Takeaways is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

Any type of semantic markup needs to have a vocabulary defined somewhere on the internet – so people can learn what the terms are, and sometimes as an essential part of a computer figuring out what the terms are.

Google officially supports microformats and RDFa:

Microformats

Microformats are a set of vocabularies developed and hosted on microformats.org.  Any interested party can contribute to the development of new and existing vocabularies.  Some of the vocabularies are stable and established and some are drafts and are liable to change.  (Interestingly enough, Google supports the hCard vocabulary for defining People and Organization, which is an established vocabulary, and the hReview vocabulary for defining reviews, which is listed as a draft.  I guess Google assumes it won’t change too much in the future.)

When you use a microformats vocabulary on your webpages, you first define which vocabulary you are using by <div class=”insert vocabulary here“>.  Then you define the term you are using from that vocabulary by <span class=”insert property here“>.

Example: <div class=”hreview”>

Then: <span class=”rating”>

(*note – “div” and “span” are not absolutes – use whatever tag fits with your formatting)

RDFa

RDFa is a practical way of using RDF – Resource Description Framework, which is a description format using “triples” of subject – property – value of the property (or, in their technical terminology, subject – predicate – object).  For example, using our brownie example from last post:

1 cup brown sugar

This statement is about the subject of brown sugar.  It contains an inherent property, which is the amount of brown sugar, and the value of the property which is 1 cup.

There are a number of RDFa vocabularies on the internet – just like microformats, the potential number is infinite.  If you want to write an RDFa vocabulary, go right ahead.  The difference between microformats and RDFa is that while microformat vocabularies are all hosted and edited on the microformats.org website, anyone can write an RDFa vocabulary and host it wherever he wants.

But if the framework is so open, how in the world (wide web – does a computer reading your webpage’s code know what you’re referring to?

When you use an RDFa vocabulary on your webpages, you first define the “name space” – the place on the internet where the list of terms and definitions is located.  You do this by writing: <div xmlns:abbreviation for your vocabulary=”URL where your vocabulary is located“  After that, for every property you want to mark up, you write: <span property=”abbreviation for your vocabulary:property>

Example: <div xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"

Then: <span property=”dc:title”>

Huh?  Does that sound confusing to you?  It did to me… and it still does.  Let’s take it slowly.

xmlns is short for “XML name space”, meaning the XML document where your vocabulary is defined.

dc in our example was the abbreviation that the creators chose to stand for the URL where their vocabulary is located (it stands for Dublin Core).

http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ is the URL itself.

Now the computer reading the RDFa knows that when it sees dc in the future, it is going to refer to a term contained within that URL, thus eliminating the need to rewrite the URL of the vocabulary source every single time you define a property.  When you add span property=”dc:title”, you are effectively telling the computer to go to the URL above and find the “title” section to understand what the property means.  The above URL actually redirects to http://dublincore.org/2008/01/14/dcelements.rdf#, making “dc:title” roughly equivalent to http://dublincore.org/2008/01/14/dcelements.rdf#title.

So now you’re about to go create your own RDFa vocabulary so you can mark up your website about your collection of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, with properties like: name, length, favorite food, best trick, decibel level of hiss…

Not so fast.  If you look at Google’s instructions for marking up your website with RDFa, you see that you are instructed to write <div xmlns:v=http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#”.  This is Google’s name space, where it defines the properties it supports in RDFa.  Currently Google only supports properties relating to people, reviews, products and organizations, and only information relating to people and reviews is actually used for display purposes.  In their latest update on Rich Snippets, Google announced that they will recognize FOAF (the Friend of a Friend vocabulary) and vCard terms that are equivalent to the terms they support.  vCard is one of the earlier published web standards for defining properties of people and organizations – microformats’ hCard and Google’s RDFa definitions are based on this standard.

Which vocabulary to use?

So with your newfound awareness of semantic markup, you now want to go and mark up all your pages using a vocabulary that Google recognizes (your Madagascar hissing cockroaches will have to wait – probably for quite a long time).

But… which vocabulary should you use?  The following is a bit of conjecture, without any definitive conclusions, but may provide food for thought as you make your decision.

Popularity

Microformats have historically (as historical as you can call relatively recent technology advances) been the more popular of the two.  A search on Google Trends shows that “microformats” were searched for a significant enough way to register starting from 2006, whereas “RDFa” only appeared on the significant search scene starting in 2009 – and it’s had its ups and downs.

Google Trends for Microformats and RDFa - since 2006

A closer look at 2009:

Google Trends for Microformats and RDFa - 2009 only

On the other hand, the quantity of “microformats” search seems to be declining since 2006 – slowly, to be sure, but steadily.

Ease of Use

Microformats seem a little bit simpler to use: take a look at Google’s example for the difference in marking up information about a person in microformats and in RDFa (you have to scroll down a bit on the page for the examples).

On the other hand, do or will CMSs (content management systems) offer built-in support for one or the other?  In the comments to the last blog post on this topic, Amir Simantov mentioned that Drupal has some built-in RDFa capabilities.

If you don’t use a CMS that has those capabilities, can your site programmer build either one more easily into your templates?  (For a client of ours who is building a new e-commerce website, we’re recommending that the programmer look into building these semantic mark-up capabilities into the product pages.)

I posed a question to the SEOmoz staff about preference in which vocabulary to use, but they also hadn’t come to any conclusions.  They did confirm my hesitation about mixing and matching vocabularies – so once you pick one, stick with it.

Are there any other points you think are relevant to deciding which one to use?  Have you had experience with either microformats or RDFa and can share some advice with us?  The comments are waiting for you.

(Okay – how many of you actually clicked on the Madagascar hissing cockroaches site?  Admit it – in the comments.  )

Microformats vs. RDFa – Google Rich Snippets, Part 2 is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

We decided to put our latest SEO blog post on SEOmoz’s user generated SEO blog – so check it out over there!

Just to give a brief summary – recently Google announced that YouTube videos (and other videos from Google’s video partners) will be able to have automatic captioning.  Admittedly this is a big step for deaf accessibility, but some SEOs voiced the opinion that having all this new topic-rich text on the page would be of benefit to SEO as well.  When we investigated, however, we saw that in fact the text doesn’t seem to appear anywhere and doesn’t seem to help…

For more details, check out the full blog post (complete with lots of images!) on SEomoz.  Enjoy!

SEO Benefits of Google/YouTube’s Automatic Captions? is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.