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It Takes a Village to Raise A Website: Links vs Citations for Small Businesses

Why is it important to have inbound links to your website? Quite simply, because to date it is the best way that the search engines to discern a truly editorial “vote” for the content on a page. It works pretty well.

When you are looking to rank better on geo targeted search terms you should be thinking about a couple of different things in terms of links. Firstly, be sure that you have claimed your business location with all of the local search engines and directories including but not limited to:

Yahoo Local
Google Maps
Yelp.com
localeze.com
merchantcircle.com

When your business only makes sense to cater to the local customer (dentist, dermatologist, exterminator, etc) you should not only be concerned with live links with keyword rich anchor text but also with something called citation. A citation may not have a live link associated with it at all. The citation may merely mention the business, the telephone number or address and may or may not comment about the site at all. The citation serves to verify the address and telephone number of the business. The search engines are interested in verifying this information in as many places as possible to ensure that the local results they are returning are accurate. A citation may look like this:

I have been going to Allied Dentists and visiting Dr. Geoff Martin for years now. If you are looking for a great experience at the dentist visit their location at:
135 Broadway
Cleveland, OH 44102

Notice that there is no live link heading back to Allied Dentists website but the search engines will use this nonetheless to verify the address that they have in their databases.

Do: Be sure that your getting both traditional links and citations for your locally dependent website.

Don’t: Just concentrate on links that would get you high rankings in the standard search algorithm.

August 3, 2008  Tags: Citations, Local Link Strategy, local seo  Posted in: Build Links to Your Site

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