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As of April 15th in Australia using UK search the top 3 contenders for this search phrase are: www.inuvate.co.uk/web-design-mansfield/ www.purposemedia.co.uk/ dijitul.com/web-design-mansfield/ Here are some contributing factors that, when combined are likely to be causing this site to outrank all the others for the search phrase 'web design mansfield'. 1. TITLE The title of the site has the exact phrase at the very beginning where as www.purposemedia.co.uk/ and quite a few of the others in the top 10 do not. 2. LINKS External: VS other sites that have that exact phrase in their title, inuvate.co.uk has either a higher number of root domain links than others in the top 10 OR has a higher ratio of RD links vs total links. They have used their links wisely and have not spammed the interwebs. Internal: Inuvate uses internal content linking where as other top contenders are not using the exact match phrase. It is also completely optimised for just this one phrase... Using the exact match phrase all the time is not always a good thing however it appears that the density isn't too high in this case. 3. SPEED inuvate is not as optimised for speed as purposemedia.co.uk however has a shorter load time inuvate has a lower ping time than the other top contenders It's more than half the total page size in MB than dijitul 4. CONTENT www.inuvate.co.uk/web-design-mansfield/ has a word count of 648 vs the other having <600 The content on the inuvate page flows nicely and unlke dijitul doesn't spam the exact match phrase at the very start of the first sentence in the first paragraph AND the H1 AND the H2. That is just pure SPAM. Purposemedia doesn't contain the exact phrase anywhere except the title... if they did, they may be able to own this search term. inuvate also has much more meaningful content that you can actually read without feeling like you're reading something written by a school kid. The above are just a few factors (i'm sure there are many more) but these combined along with others do make a BIG difference. Big love from GEEKSEO!

Hi Echo, Sorry I didn't see this question earlier. I agree with Chris. For SABs, this really wouldn't have value.

Hi David, Yes, it's fine to have unique Place pages for the partners in a legal firm - you are correct. But, you are saying that they are unverified? Then, yes, I would recommend that the firm verify any listings that belong to them. This will bring the listings within the control of the account and offer a measure of protection against hijacking. I also recommend that you read some of the recent posts by Mike Blumenthal on the new rollout of the Google Places for Business so that you are aware of changes going on in the system that effect different business models in different ways. Here are a couple of links: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/04/02/analysis-google-places-for-business-or-g-pages-lite/ http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/04/02/google-local-rolling-out-places-for-business-upgrade/ Hope these resources are helpful!

Hi David, Unfortunately, there is a big ongoing issue right now with the upload time of photos. A lot of people are blogging about their frustration with this. I would recommend you use a friend or family member's Google+ account to do a user upload of a photo, as this apparently will be published faster at this time than the owner publish option will. Kind of silly, I know, but Google is aware that this is an issue going on.

Thanks David!

Hi Echo, I don't have an exact answer for this, as I imagine there would be a variety of factors involved. However, over the past year, we've had tons of questions from local business owners here in Q&A wondering why their organic ranking had 'disappeared'. Pretty much every time, it was because they had claimed a Google Place/Google+ Local listing, resulting in the previous organic rank being subsumed into the new local one. So, their rankings hadn't really been lost; they had been converted into a new local listing, the rankings of which depend, in part, on organic signals. And, of course, Google only shows a set number of first page local results for each query (be that 3 or 7 or what have you) and so other businesses will fall outside that limited number and may only have an organic rank on the page.

Do they have a service area where the company goes to other locations to perform the business? There are ways to deal with that in local. Otherwise, it may be a little more tricky or not appropriate to be in local directories. If you can share a little more information I'll make sure the correct person sees this question. Thanks!

I think that's a smart idea, echo1. Starting a thread in the Google and your Business forum seems like your best bet for getting direct Google feedback on this.

My pleasure!

Thanks Steven

I totally agree re 2 relevant vs 1 semi-relevant. I take your point about not having explained that in detail before - I'll try and get something written to explain that! Thanks for challenging me and forcing me to articulate it with more clarity!

I don't know of any ultimate guides, but I can answer your questions: ALT Tags - This is the most important property for SEO. Use your keywords here. Image Title - This has zero SEO value for Google, but can provide a good user experience URL of JPG - This has SEO impact, use a relevant name:" keyword-keyword.jpg" not "IMG00001.jpg" Schema - I haven't seen any concrete studies, but semantic markup helps Google determine what the image is about, so it can potentially help. Use it if it makes sense. Meta Tags - Meta tags don't matter Pinterest - Pinterest pulls all images on a page automatically as long as they are bigger than 80x80 pixels Other social - Facebook Opengraph tags are great because they allow you to specify what image will be used when your content is shared on FB. However, it has no impact on SEO. Other factors for image SEO: People linking to the image, the content surrounding the image (should be related to your image), the overall theme of your site (should be related to the image), use large, high quality images. I think that about covers it.

Hi David, If you've got duplicate listing issues going on, then yes, that can definitely affect your rankings. Duplicates in Google+ Local can totally sap your ranking power. In other indexes the main concern with duplicates is that if their data varies in any way, they can decrease Google's trust in the validity and accuracy of your data. So, if you've determined you've got a duplicate problem going on, then that is a very likely contributor to ranking issues.

Many thanks for taking the time to answer my question.    I have renamed the file names that appear on the browse page here; http://cycling-jersey-collection.com/browse-collection/ I have a unique reference for each item (a UUID) so I've used that for the 220px file name. I have not deleted the original files yet - I'm assuming I should wait until google re-indexes the website?

no worries!

Hi Tonyklu, What I believe you are asking is how to improve the rank of your client's Google+ Local page for all 5 of his categories, rather than just the 2 high rankings you've achieved for 2 of his categories so far. Is that correct? If I am correct, then: Be sure you're building out very strong content on the client's site that supports his relevance to these other 3 categories. Be sure you're conducing a good citation building campaign. Be sure there are not violations on his Google+ Local page, and that there are no other issues like merged listings, duplicates, etc. Good inbound links to the website that identify the client's activity in these 3 other categories could help. A slow but steady stream of reviews on the client's Google+ Local page could help. This advice is on the generic side, but this is the general picture of how you build authority for any category. Hope this helps!

Ain't nothin' comfortable about that.  It's why you need to charge your local clients significant fee.  UBL (for example) takes care of the updating but you have to deal with dupes and untangling their shotgun approach to creating profiles and the overhead of figuring out their reporting.  Once you hit their professional level service ( I think they still call it that) things start getting weird for you as an agency.  Their basic service gets much of the distribution taken care of and then you can take are of dealing with the sites that require profiles and verification. Still, you gotta charge the client appropriately.

Brett, another resource to consider would be a Local U session, either Local U or Local U Advanced.  Local U is organized by Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm and it includes the expertise of faculty like Aaron Weiche, Matt McGee, Ed Reese, Mike Ramsey, Mary Bowling, and others.  The Local U half-day sessions are scheduled around the country and Local U Advanced is next scheduled as a workshop following SMX Advanced in Seattle, June 13.  If you're interested in attending Local U Advanced in Seattle, early bird rates expire on Saturday.  There's more information about the curriculum at LocalU.org.  I've attended two Local U sessions and Local U Advanced in the last year and it's transformed what I can do for my clients -- I recommend it!  Good Luck! Paul

Hi Melissa, Internal link anchor text DOES has some effect.  It's not huge, and not as important as the page title, by a long shot.  But what you're doing would be very, very common and really not a problem. Michael.

you can create one gmail account and then claim ownership for all accounts while logged in and request pins, all 40 accounts will be listed under that one gmail account.