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Hi Nick, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'll take a step-by-step approach in my reply. The first thing to do is to determine whether your company qualifies for inclusion in Google Places. In order to qualify, you must have a business name, a dedicated local area code phone number (not a toll free number or redirected number) and a dedicated physical street address (not a shared address, not a PO box or virtual office). Additionally, in order to qualify, you must do business face-to-face with your customers. So, for example, if your business was a virtual business like an eCommerce store or a virtual directory, you would not qualify for inclusion. But so long as you meet all of the above criteria, you do qualify. Next, go to maps.google.com and search for your business name and phone number. See if anything comes up. Many business owners discover that they already have a Google Place Page because Google populates their index from much 3rd party data. If you already have a Google Place Page, you will want to claim it by clicking the 'are you the business owner' link on the page. In such cases, look carefully at all of the information published about you to see if Google has made any mistakes so that you can correct them when you claim the business.  If you do not have a Google Place Page, you will be creating one from scratch and must have a Google account (such as gmail, etc.) in order to do so. The next thing to do is to carefully study the Google Places Quality Guidelines. Read them closely to be sure that you will not violate any of the guidelines in creating your Google Place Page. The Guidelines are here: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 The guidelines will explain to you exactly how to list your business, and most especially, what NOT to do. The reason that this is so important is that if you violate the guidelines, your account may be penalized or banned and getting back into Google's good graces can be next impossible to do after you've erred. Due to a recent change in Google's guidelines, it is now critical that you determine which of 3 types of business models describes your business. All customers come to your place of business. In this case, you simply allow Google to show your address and need not take any special steps. Some customer come to you and you go to some customers. In this case, while creating your Google Place Page, you will choose to have Google show your address, but you will also be selecting a service area radius showing the extent to which you travel to customers. You travel to all customers (chimney sweep, landscaper, taxi company would be businesses like this). In this case, you must choose the 'hide address' function while creating your Place Page in order to be in keeping with Google's new guidelines on this. So, basically, read all the guidelines and comply with them. Consider uploading up to 10 photos and 2 or more videos while creating your Place Page to make it more complete. Then,at the end of filling out your information, you will be required to verify it. Sometimes Google offers you the option to verify by phone, in which case, they will call you with a pin number you have to enter. At other times, Google offers verification by postcard, in which case, you will be receiving a postcard with a pin number that you have to come back and enter in. Sometimes Google offers both options...sometimes only the postcard option. Once your Place Page has been verified and indexed, the work ahead of you will involve gaining citations and reviews for the business. These are things you can learn about as you go along. If your business fits the local criteria described at the beginning of this post, you will also want to be building other profiles in other local business indexes. Here is a link to an excellent SearchEngineLand post on the top 50 citation sources for the USA and UK: http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938 Finally, getting your Place Page filled out and verified is just one important aspect of a Local SEO campaign. The Local optimization of your website is critical to your rankings. So, this is another area of study ahead of you. Hope this detailed summary of steps is helpful. Good luck!

Thank you both! I was able to geotarget the subfolder via Webmasters Tool. Now I'll check the results. Thank you! Ariel

If anyone's curious, I found this to be the answer to my question http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/ Great bit of advice

You're very welcome. Thanks for participating in Q&A! Miriam

Good question. Lets make sure you have the right information and you understand what is happening before you come up with a strategy to fix it.........there isnt an easy way to work with traditional third party review sites because of the issue google had with yelp and others....so it has created a small void in the marketplace. You have to build the history back up with google places and hotpot and google maps reviews....THAT IS YOUR BEST OPTION. Don't forget about the other third party review sites, because everyone believes that google is still using that info for relevancy and quality score.... Here is feedback from Google on why they were removed and some additional thoughts on why no third party reviews can really make a huge impact on building the seo value back up......... The official reason the changes were made is that Google has said it wanted to remove the "spammy reviews". Here is googles official response. There is a detailed technical response posting on googles site. here is the link.... http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2445832 Here is what they said: "You may have seen reviews suddenly disappear from your listing. A few reasons why that may be the case: Reviews from third-party websites are no longer displayed on Google Places listings. Below the reviews by Google users, we may link “Reviews around the web” on third-party sites. Reviews are removed from Google Maps because they exhibit spammy behavior. We can't share specifics about what signals we use, but our goal is to provide end-users with high-quality information they can trust and use that info to make informed decisions. We also remove reviews that violate our content policy guidelines. We know that sometimes our algorithms may flag and remove legitimate reviews in our effort to combat abuse, but believe that overall, these measures are helping to ensure that the reviews appearing on Place pages are authentic, relevant and useful. Here's our reviews posting guidelines and policy: http://goo.gl/LtFCS We have data spread across multiple databases, and we bring all that information together to create your local listing. Reviews can sometimes be dropped from Place pages when we’re trying to reconcile all that information. As we mentioned at the beginning of this note: This is a known issue, and we are working to make it better. Occasionally, there is a technical issue that causes Place page reviews to drop from Google Maps for a short period of time (a few days) and then reappear on your listing. This happens every several weeks, when we push out a giant housecleaning update to our listings database. Again, this is a known issue, and we are working to make it better." That is what google posted. Now the unofficial explanation is they had disagreements with several review sites like Yelp where they wanted free access to all the review content and then would basically undermine yelps positioning in search by posting yelps and other review sites info....yelp said no way. They decided to stop taking the info from third party sites. To solve your problem you have to make sure you have solid google places, hotpot and maps reviews and citations..... Hope this helps.

Makes sense, thanks Alan

Thank you Ankit I thought that was the case.  I just got impatient!  I'll play the waiting game. ta!

Spot on response from WebBizIdeas! Buzzwords - here's a good little article about this from Mike Blumenthal from when this change happened: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/28/google-still-supporting-kml-files-but-not-the-use-of-geo-sitemaps/ Everybody's a newbie at some point. You're doing the right thing taking steps to learn! Good luck!

Thanks Miriam for the follow up, I appreciate it!

I agree with Matthew, I would make to separate sitemaps and submit them both. Don't forget to type up the scripts in the video descriptions!

Hi Brad, Ask not what you can do to maximise your SEO, but what can you do to make your user experience better. In other words ensure that your visitor gets all the info he/she needs. 1. Make sure you link to products in the Video Description so anyone watching can easy find and purchase. 2. Have you considered creating a transcript to go along with the video? 3. Are the videos embedded on your product pages? 4. Have you shared the videos with your social circles? 5. Are the videos correctly branded with your website logo and URL? alot can change in a few years is the branding the same as it was when the videos were produced? 6. Have you considered creating some new videos? You channel may or may not have subscribers who could come back and view your new videos and maybe purchase a product or two. These are just my initial thoughs on what I would consider doing, I'm sure you have already touched upon these. Cheers Aran

For the hosting question, see Phil Nottingham's post on SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo.

thank you. this was very helpful.

You might be able to get fancy with the Google search operators: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html For example I was able to use inurl:1MnylRaQC3w to get the pages embedding that video. EDIT-Hmm, doesn't return the gizmodo one you want though. Unfortunately each site is probably going to embed the video a bit differently. It looks like Gizmodo is doing it entirely in Javascript and I'm not sure how to search within that exclusively. intext: doesn't seem to be doing the job.

Hi Robert, You are right in your conclusion that on things like this 'only Google knows'. However, your example term is an interesting one as Google has historically been odd in their treatment of marketing and SEO firms when it comes to local results. Google kicked SEO companies out of the local organic results a couple of years ago, and some marketing firms got the boot as well. However, for the term you've specified, I do see 1 blended local result coming up for a firm called 'The Marketing Company Scotland'. Everything else on the page of results is organic (searching from my location in California, but at least one company is being given local treatment. It has long been a mystery how Google decides which queries have a local intent. Sometimes they just don't show local results for things you think they would and other times, they show local results when that wasn't your intent, as the searcher, at all. There isn't really a way to influence their decision on this...at least, not that I've heard of, and like yourself, I've been been doing Local SEO for years. The only thing to hang your hat on is that Google is constantly changing their handling of local. What they are doing today may not be what they are doing and, eventually, you may see them decide that your query of choice is local in intent. Thanks for asking such a good question here! Miriam

Hi Again, Number1Direct, Thanks for providing the additional information. Yes, this is a tough situation because you have branded your website differently than you are known locally. Because of this choice, you may not be able to get Google to show your Place Page for the 'number1direct' queries, because it looks pretty clear that this brand name is associated with an e-commerce website. I do have a few thoughts, though: 1. You should not be using a toll free number on your Google Place Page. That absolutely must be a local area code phone number. 2. Similarly, I would recommend that if you want to do all you can to associate your domain name with your actual business name, you couch all 800 numbers in image text and put your local area code phone number in real text down with your address in the footer and on the contact page. 3. I would also recommend using hCard or schema to display your NAP (Name, Address, Local Area Code Phone number in the footer and on the contact page). 4. I see Goedecker's in the title tag of your homepage. I'd put it first in order on the contact page and I would refer to the business as Goedecker's Number 1 Direct throughout the copy on the website. I realize, this is a little awkward but you want the connection to be as clear as possible. 5. I would move break the Contact Us link out of the About Us section up into the main navigation and give it its own top level link. 6. I would add content to the homepage explaining 'Visit our Store at 13850 Manchester Road, Ballwin, Missouri 63011' or shop here on our website'. These are some tweaks you could make to see if it makes a difference. While it's impossible to force Google to change the way they display results for a query, you can influence this. Right now, your website is very much geared to being a virtual shopping destination. If you can alter that emphasis to give more focus to the local nature of your business, then you might see a change in how Google is perceiving your company. Good luck! Miriam

It's perfectly possible to get a .com ranking well in the UK - there are lots of sites that use a .com and rank just fine. However if time is of the essence (and when is it not?) and you have the .co.uk domain then switching now and building further links to the .co.uk is probably a good option for you