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Hi SpeakCreative, As of January 2010, Google stopped showing truly local results for queries like yours: web design memphis. Designers, SEOs and other marketers were hit with this filter and it has never been rescinded. Because of this, when you're dealing with a query like yours, you are likely actually dealing with an organic SEO issue, rather than a Local SEO one. Because or this, the answer to your question lies in competitive analysis of the competitors who are outranking you, to discover where they are surpassing you. Then, the task will be to make a greater effort than they have. In other words, there isn't going to be a simple answer to a question like yours. The answer will be discovered via a close analysis of who is ranking and why.

Ive never got used to using allow although I know many people do. I simply use: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Sitemap: http://www.aa-rental.com/ Where user agent * means all crawlers; Where disallow: /cgi-bin/ means i dont want them crawling that folder (put in any folder name there) but they can crawl anywhere else... Sitemap: points to my XML sitemap

Yes, and I'd ask: What do they do on the off months? You can help them on the one months, but what are they doing to diversify their income? Help them with both and you'll have a client for a long time

Hi Sara, To qualify for local inclusion, your business needs to meet these criteria: Has a unique street address (not a PO box, not a virtual office) Has a unique local area code phone number in the city of location (not an 800 number or tracking number) Has face-to-face transactions with its customers, either at the place of business (like a hair salon) or at the customers' locations (like a window washer). It sounds like #3 may be the sticking point for you. Do you have in-person transactions with your customers? Feel free to provide further details on this.

Ah, if you use Google as the marketplace to sell you products, how do you know which rank your products show up in the SERPs. That's a good question.. I'll have to do some digging for you first.

Hi EGOL, Your points are well taken and it sounds like YouTube is definitely the best option for your business.  If you are using video to generate ad revenue then YouTube is a great partner...  my comment that their business is built for advertisers plays both ways -- if you want ad revenue then this is a positive attribute of YT, rather than a criticism. Our customers (ourselves included) use video in a very different way.  Instead of a direct source of revenue, we use video as a marketing tool to drive customers to our website, to explain our products and business, to provide support to customers, etc.  We don't want YouTube to own these assets and we certainly don't want ads appearing anywhere on our videos or our site.  Obviously we are not the solution for everyone using video on the internet and that is not our goal -- we just want to provide an alternative for businesses who want more control over the video assets that they spent lots of time, effort and money producing! Hopefully that helps to clarify. Ben

Do you have someone else posting for you, they might be adding the pictures differently. You can go in and edit them or add them whatever way you like by using the source view window instead of the wysiwyg editor. But to answer your question, it's not a big deal. If you were to do this on a site with a million pages you would probably want to fix this but for a regular scale site it's not an issue. How are your sitemaps looking, free of errors and warnings?

Trying to get to a good solution for what I was wanting has inspired me to write a complete blog post on everything we are working to accomplish with our Video SEO. After search high and low, I did find exactly what I was looking for. It is a tool called "CaptionBox."  There is a WordPress plug-in available. Information on the page explains that it's a legacy product, but we are going to install it anyway. For more information on SpeakerText's answer to my question as to whether or not we could still use their product despite not being an Enterprise customer, stay tuned for a blog post within the next 3-4 days.

Hi Ty, To be honest, you may need to hire a Local SEO to figure this out one-on-one with you. There are so many reasons a listing can drop or disappear. I will give a few ideas here, but this should by no means be considered as coverage of all the things that could cause this: You've failed to hide the address of a business that Google knows or believes doesn't serve customers at the place of business (i.e. the client has a go-to-client business model like a carpet cleaning company or dog walker). This can cause listings to be totally pulled. You have unknowingly violated a different guideline. The listing isn't actually not there...it exists but is buried so deep, you're just not finding it. The listing has merged with listing of one of the other branches in the business, or with that of a totally unrelated business. Duplicate listings may have caused the listing to drop out of site. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and as you can see, it's hard to diagnose anything like this without a hands on investigation of the issue. I do have a couple of recommendations for you to get you a little further along on your path. Fill out this Google Form to report the problem: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs Check out this thread at the Local Search Forum where a business is describing something quite similar. The advice is the same as mine - fill out the form - but I think you might seem some things in this thread that could ring a bell for you in your own situation: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-help-support/427-google-local-page-just-disappeared.html

Hey Tom, This should be a relatively simple process for you. Just ensure you aren't hiding the <video>tag behind a load of JavaScript and then reference the .mp4 version of the file in the <content_loc> element of your video sitemap, along side a thumbnail and other required metadata -http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472</content_loc></video> However, in answer to your Q's, there are a couple of things you can do to make the rich snippets surefire You should also add the videoObject schema mark up (http://schema.org/VideoObject) before the <video>tag  <div< span="">itemprop="video" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject"></div<></video> If you're delivering both videos through the same player, i basically wouldn't worry about it and would just mark everything up to match the default (i assume) HD settings. Otherwise, i'd mark the two different versions as different schema.org videoObject's, using videoQuality and videoFrameSize to differentiate one as HD and one as SD. In your video sitemap, you should then include both videos under the same URL. Google claim they don't currently crawl Theora files. While this will certainly change going forward, i would for now just include the MP4 file in the video sitemap. What you include in the actual HTML probably wont matter, but safest bet will be to have the MP4 referenced. Hope that's useful! Phil

My pleasure, Kirk. Thanks for bringing your good question to Q&A!

BTY you have a very nice site I noticed you have yelp reviews installed have you ever thought about allowing your readers to post their own reviews? I believe that would help you more in the long run.

Is that something you would feel comfortable explaining to a Google engineer? Also, if search engines did not exist, would you still want to do it? The search engines want to see content created for users, not for trying to get rankings. Spinning articles doesn't do anyone any good, and they can make the brand look very silly.