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No problem Derrick, my pleasure. Tom

Sounds like a good idea. How to poke a listing. Sign into your Google Places account,  click edit, DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING, but hit submit. Google reps have actually recommended poking a listing on occasion (maybe every few weeks or once a month) helps to keep the listing fresh. Sometimes it clears up data issues, so it might be worth trying, in your case. Hope this helps!

Hi Derrick, I hear you on that, but Google's total guidelines for Local businesses (http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528) are very cursory...some might say intentionally so. Google is not motivated to explain word for word how to achieve high rankings in their system, so while the basic mantra of creating content for users and not search engines is their public message, the truth of the matter is that a great deal of what Local SEOs and SEOs do is experimental and is very much about the bots and not people. When something is found to work, the idea gets spread around and becomes an accepted best practice that aids ranking efforts, until Google changes their rules (think Penguin, Panda, and the never-ending changes of policy in Local). Schema and other types of markup are relatively new, so everyone is pretty much experimenting with this. What you would be doing would fall in line with that, if you choose to test your strategy idea. Who knows, you might discover something no one else has noticed! You're not alone in wishing the guidelines were totally clear about every scenario, but one might say that it's not in Google's best interests to operate that way, right?

Derek, PS you would get a much better rank and the site would look sharper if you swapped out YouTube for http://wistia.com/ videos they have S EO site map and you get 5 for free for life. All the best, Tom

This is the point where SEO becomes as much art-form as science.  Creative implementation is the challenge you're talking about and there is no single "right" answer. I can tell you that in some niche's and some cities I have seen sites that go the spammy route penalized over time, though yes, it is still possible to get away with it in some situations. personally I don't encourage it because all that effort could not only be lost overnight, but recovery could then be more challenging afterward. Single Town approach: Minneapolis lawn care - 880 Minneapolis lawn service - 590 Minneapolis lawn mowing - 260 Page Title:  Minneapolis Lawn Care | Lawn Service Minneapolis H1 tag: Minneapolis Lawn Care & Mowing Service ("Minneapolis lawn mowing" being the third phrase you'd want to integrate) Minneapolis Snow Removal - 590 Minneapolis Snow Plowing - 320 Minneapolis Snow Removal services - 58 Page Title: Snow Removal Services Minneapolis | Snow Plowing H1 tag: Minneapolis Snow Removal & Plowing Services Multi-town approach: This is more challenging given the ability to only go so far to integrate phrase variations.  Just one consideration might be: Page Title: Minneapolis Lawn Care | Lawn Service | Lakeville | Apple Valley H1: Lawn Care & Mowing Service covering Minneapolis, Lakeville, Apple Valley & surrounding areas Page Title: Snow Removal Minneapolis | Snow Plowing | Lakeville | Apple Valley H1: Snow Removal & Plowing covering Minneapolis, Lakeville, Apple Valley & surrounding areas In both of these examples, I ensured to keep the Page Title within reasonable length for viewing in Google results, opting to cut out a 2nd tier word in exchange for additional town references. NOTE: I would not attempt to optimize more than that on any single page - that's the upper limit because it could get stupid, dilute SEO, and annoy prospective readers.

Thanks Littlesthobo! I feel I am doing the right things, as you described, socially.  Have all the accounts and I dedicate a couple hours every Friday to social. "Also ensure you have cast iron on page, pick a keyword per page and make sure the page fully reflects that keyword" I am going to start a new topic about this because I have a interesting problem.  Being that I service rural area, my ideal keywords consist of four cities and two services.  Thats tough sledding when trying to build a site that is easy to navigate, visually appealing and optimized.  I assume it's not wise to put "city y service, city x service, city z service" in the title and then try to naturally implement all those keywords into said service page. I need to decide if I should limit my city to 1 or build multiple pages for each city.   Each has it's pros and cons from my inexperienced point of view.  The multiple pages looks amateur-ish and  takes away from navigation / appeal.  (Lakeville lawn care page, eagan lawn care page, apple valley lawn care page) The one city limits my potential customers. As a start up business, I am leaning toward 1 city and then worrying about expanding the scope of the site later, but am certainly open to suggestions.

Thanks for the reply, Takeshi! "In general, what Google is looking for is reviews of your product that people have left on your site. " Interesting.   So even if I were to take a Google review and highlight as an achievement on my site, with a link back to the review on Google, it could be frowned upon? So in order to implement rish snippets for reviews, as intended by Google, I need to setup a review system on my site?  I find that strange,   Who is monitoring the authenticity of the reviews, Me.. Great... Who is denying all reviews under 4 stars, me. Seems to me a more ethical practice would be to link to reviews on 3rd party sites.  Sure, I can chose to only link to the positive, but at least its from a 3rd party site  and while there the user can see my other reviews. "The semantic markup code you wrote above looks fine, just be sure to put a space where you put "itemscopeitemtype" (it should be "itemscope itemtype")" Thanks, I will make that correction!