Optimization of business profiles in the Bing Business Portal (or “BBP”) is not difficult nor time-consuming. Microsoft’s newish Beta interfacing for administrating business listing details is actually pretty slick and easy to use.

10 Tips For Optimizing Local Business Listings In Bing

1.  The first key is to claim your business listing

As with other local search engines, having a business owner claim a listing helps to validate the information and establish that the business is active, helping increase “trust ranking” factors.

One of the hardest issues for local search engines and online directories to handle is figuring out which businesses have expired so that they can remove their listings from the databases — so, they have a horror of displaying stale listings to consumers. It’s reasonable to think that businesses which have some signal indicating they’re active will be more likely to be presented more prominently to searchers.

2.  Correct and standardize your basic business contact information

The core contact information needs to be consistently shown in all major places including in Bing Local. The basic contact data is the business Name, Address, and Phone # (a.k.a. “N.A.P.”) — along with the website URL.

3.  Add an image to your listing! 

One striking characteristic of Bing Local searches is how higher-ranking businesses appear to more frequently have images associated with their listings! (See also my earlier articles on optimizing images for local search here and here.) Could be that listings that have images are claimed, and rank higher due to that status, or it could be directly related to the presence of the thumbnails.

Either way, businesses that have pics may have greater chance of ranking well in Bing Local. Example – top two listings for a search for “intellectual property attorneys, chicago, il”:

4.  Set your hours of operation!

Bing Local business profiles actually include a small  sign icon. While I haven’t tested this, I wouldn’t be surprised if businesses might be a little more likely to rank better during times when they list themselves as being open, particularly in mobile search.

Even if it isn’t a direct ranking signal, however, the fact that the profile page gets the bright, attention-getting icon makes it worthwhile as a possibly conversion-increasing element!

5.  Check your categories, and add more where possible!

Business categories like “Plumbers”, “Florists”, and “Attorneys” are core elements involved in local search rankings, yet they can often be wrong or so minimally specified as to detract from the promotion potential that business listings would otherwise possess.

When a local search keyword matches a business’s category — either partially as a “fuzzy match” or as a thesaurus match — the listing is far more likely to rank for it.

6. Go a step beyond categories 

Bing appears to treat “Specialities” similarly to categories or like subcategories, so add relevant specialties.

7. For restaurants, integrate with OpenTable

Integrating with OpenTable to handle reservation scheduling will enable a convenient ”reservations” link to appear on the profile page in Bing.

8.  Add deals to your listing!

Bing appears to have also integrated with Groupon, so if you have a Groupon offer going on, it could appear with your local listing in Bing, too. But, Bing Group Deals may be set up directly within the BBP as well.

9.  Develop citations!

Just as with Google Place Search and Google Maps, Bing Local listings need to have citations and inlinks in order to rank well. Local citation sources which may be influential in Bing include YP.com, Superpages.com, Yahoo! Local, Manta, Judy’s Book, and more. Vertical directories also likely work well here, too, such as Restaurants.com, FindLaw.com, Dentists.com, Contractors.com, etc.

10.  Optimize your local business website

Having a well-optimized local biz website helps all of your external optimizations work hand-in-hand with the on-site optimization. Businesses with good website optimization have a better chance of ranking well and getting found by consumers seeking their products and services.

Bing and other search engines compare listing information against the information found on the website, so keeping the listing data and “N.A.P.” consistent helps reinforce and validate the vital local search criteria.

These basic local optimization tips are pretty obvious to any experienced local marketer, but it’s always amazing how many local businesses fail to check their listings for correctness, consistency and areas where information may be expanded or enhanced.

Sites which follow these simple tips often get an edge over their competition — and, in internet marketing the “early worm” which grabs marketshare first often gets an advantage that extends well into the future. For more details around optimizing local directory profiles, see my earlier article, Anatomy & Optimization Of A Local Business Profile.

For the purpose of this article, I’m using a broader definition for “local search” which includes local services and related marketing technologies through which consumers might discover local businesses and those businesses’ promotional efforts.

Online options for marketing and distribution of local business messages expanded over the past few years and throughout 2011.

Local companies now have a huge number of directory sites, services and technologies they may use in promotions, including local-targeted pay-per-click ads, daily deals platforms like Groupon (as well the Groupon-clones), check-in services like Foursquare, QR codes, etc.

Google’s Not The Only Game In Localtown

While Google’s sheer market share makes it a primary go-to place for finding local businesses (and therefore, a prime place for promoting them, too), other major players such as Facebook and Twitter also have sufficiently compelling audiences, and a myriad of other online directories and services form a second tier of effective marketing channels as well.

So, even though Google is a major place where consumers go to search for local stuff, it is still has not sidelined all competition enough to make it the only place, and the wide variety of promotion options for local businesses may be expected to be available for the foreseeable future.

Twitter Turns To Local?

Twitter’s local places efforts have still seemed very nascent in 2011, yet local business marketing is one of the primary areas where Twitter should be able to see even greater growth.

Expect to see more evolution of Twitter pages for local businesses with an eye towards expansion of paid promotion offerings available for businesses to use in promoting their brands, services, and products.

While some check-in services closed in 2011 (Gowalla and Bizzy, for instance), Foursquare continues to have a strong usership and just enough draw to keep its audience growing and engaged.

Can Facebook Check-ins Compete With Foursquare?

Meanwhile, Facebook’s check-in service still does not seem as robust or compelling as Foursquare’s. Others have opined that Facebook’s efforts to roll location into being available for via status updates could be some sort of acknowledgement that their checkin service simply wasn’t effective.

However, I see indications that users continue to use and like the main check-in service — I predict Facebook may find ways to make checkins even more compelling, perhaps with the enhancement of game dynamics and/or paid business promotions. Their acquisition of Gowalla’s personnel in December could breathe new life into the service, and they’re undoubtedly going to be gunning for Foursquare.

Foursquare itself may be expected to further evolve their service in 2012. Perhaps they will expand their advertiser base by offering greater flexibility and more types of advertising products.

One thing which confounds me is that they have not really tied-in some sort of loyalty program with the service — something that should be a no-brainer mashup. In fact, this makes so much sense that I’ll predict it is going to happen eventually.

Another point regarding Facebook — their overall product mixture for local businesses has simply been incoherent, and I can’t see that continuing. Local business information is muddled among numerous types of pages and quirky limitations: Wikipedia Location Articles / Facebook Pages / Facebook User Accounts / Check-ins / Groups / Business Categories / Etc.

SMBs are frequently confused by how they ought to go about representing themselves in Facebook, or claiming their existing listing profiles there. Is Facebook motivated to fix this incoherence? Would Facebook have enough clarity of vision and focus to do so? Or, is Facebook even aware of how poorly the integration of each local business option affects small business owners?

I predict that Facebook might further revamp their local suite, making it more coherent and much more of a juggernaut in local search. Facebook could easily become #2 in local search against Google if they were to merely focus a bit better.

Yellow Page Companies Continue To Fight For Local Relevancy

Yellow pages companies have been down, but not fully “out”, since some of the larger ones have been caught up in bankruptcy reorganizations over the past few years, multiple rounds of cost-cutting, and the aftermath thereof. These activities have distracted them from competing as aggressively as they might have otherwise.

Now that they’re leaner and meaner, they might be agile enough to compete better, although they would have to make up for lost ground and their knowledgeable personnel have shrunk and moved on to greener pastures in some cases (quite a number of my colleagues from Superpages now work for Google, Bing, and Yahoo!).

The notable exception among the large yellow pages companies is AT&T’s YP.com interactive division which has fine-tuned their branding, bumped up their organic traffic, engaged with mobile, and even experimented some with their own social media concepts.

Will having the insulation of their telco “mother ship” continue to give them enough leeway to experiment and evolve their products to compete effectively? Possibly.

They still need to answer the question posed by Google, Bing and other local services — if consumers find businesses directly through those other means, what is the compelling draw to attract them to YP.com? For now, I must predict that the glow of yellow pages from most IYP companies may continue to dim during 2012, while YP.com may stay in a holding pattern.

I can’t fail to mention the companies which feed into the IYPs — the data aggregators. I’ve believed for a while that data aggregation is poised for some collapse in the numbers of competitors since the shrinking directory market may not be expected to support so many suppliers.

However, the companies involved in these services have found ways to innovate via diversifications and strong partnerships or influxes of investment capital (for example Neustar’s acquisition of TargusInfo, the parent company of Localeze).

The tension involved with data “wanting to be free” versus the demand for local data and the needs of aggregators to monetize their work will continue to create some interesting evolution in this space, I predict. I still see some possible mergers in this niche, and more interesting partnerships developing among them with other interactive local companies.

I foresee further rise of vertical business marketing services and agencies specialized in local search for 2012. These firms seem to effectively bridge the gap between major marketing channels and the SMBs which need help in integrating an online marketing plan.

Companies involved in providing vertical marketing services include those focused on doctors, law firms (i.e. FindLaw), audiologists (i.e. Audiology Online), doctors, restaurants, dentists, and hotels (i.e. TIG Global).

Google Will Go-Ahead With Increased Integrations

One no-brainer for 2012 will be to expect further transformations of the Google Place Search and Maps algorithms. Google continues innovating in their various vertical search products, and particularly in local vis-a-vis Place Search and Maps.

Just before the beginning of 2011, Google moved their heavy-hitter, Marissa Mayer, from overall product development into laser-focus on Local products — and we may expect to see significant work to continue to come out of this high-priority zone within the Googleplex.

Indications are that Google Plus is not going to be just another abortive social media effort on Google’s part, and Google Plus pages for local businesses have not really emerged as of yet — I think we can expect some potential disruption to happen between the new Google Plus business pages and the current Google Place pages.

Even beyond this high-profile project to integrate Plus with Local, Google’s local team can be expected to continue to innovate in small, itterative deployments as they always have — but, perhaps at a more rapid intensity. They have suffered some from lack of coordination among their multi-pronged development efforts in the past, but this is part of what Mayer was brought in to address.

If Google Places/Maps solves some of the difficulties in coordination of multiple, simultaneous dev projects which all have touchpoints and overlap, the velocity of iterative changes may be expected to ramp up. This is one area where the 2012 dragon will roar!

Mobile Will Be Focal Point For Many

More businesses will focus on Mobile friendly websites this year. Mobile arrived and grew to over 100 million people in the US in 2011 (over 40 million access social networks daily via mobile, and eventually there may be more mobile web users than PC users by 2015).

I think we may expect some sort of industry standardizations in terms of consumer opt-in/opt-out permissions for location disclosure on mobile devices and apps. What do I mean by this? Well, there is no real industry standard yet, but consumers have become more aware of how mobile devices know their locations, and how specific applications may be using that information.

Also, 2011 saw some extensive cases where devices and apps snooped on locations as well as other personal data (read info on the Carrier IQ debacle), and European and United States governments began making louder noises about restrictions being placed to address privacy issues.

The industries involved are hyper-aware that their abilities to do business could be rapidly impaired due to oppressive regulation in this regard, so there are incentives for the industry to self-regulate, and for the industry to make personal data controls very clear and understandable to consumers. So, I predict some efforts at standardization and simplification across devices and applications.

Hijacked Listings & Spam Continue To Plague Local

This will also, unfortunately, still be a year for spammers to continue to exploit multitudinous openings in local search services as well. While each of the well-established online local players continue to fight against spam incursions, newer local services (including Facebook and Twitter) appear to be virtually wide open to all sorts of issues including false data, hijacked listings, and more.

Expect to see more of this going on in 2012, and perhaps ramping up in terms of seriousness, the variety of types of spam, and how visible the more widespread issues will become. Nearly all of the online information resources appear to be more intent upon rolling out additions and new services rather than expending energy on spam-fighting. Here’s one prediction about which I want to be wrong!

So, here it is: Year of the Dragon. You can expect more ongoing significant changes in the local search landscape this year. The trends are not slowing down, and the fractured nature of local online marketing shows little sign of getting simpler!

There’s a growing buzz amongst search engine optimization (SEO) circles at the moment that Pinterest is rapidly gaining traffic and traction (see Pinterest Gaining Traction for External SEO and Pinterest: Link Building & SEO Strategies).

You can see its virtually astronomical rise on Google Trends, compared with other popular image-sharing sites:

The cool thing is, the rising popularity of Pinterest is from real users who like the service and not just from marketers or spammers. I’m seeing many everyday users requesting invites (the service is still in beta), perhaps drawn to it by its attractive user interface coupled with social media features.

As a search engine optimization consultant, I’m interested in the ranking benefit that comes from particularly popular sites — but, Pinterest’s audience share is rapidly evolving into something cool, all on its own! So, even if it did not have a potential benefit to search rankings, the channel has a growing audience that makes it worthwhile for promotions.

I’ve previously written about how to optimize using Flickr because of its value according to my comparison of the SEO value of photo sharing services. Flickr has long enjoyed preeminence due to its optimal construction paired with its large audience of users.

But, the Google Trends graph above indicates that Pinterest’s usage may be surpassing that of Flickr — and, there’s one very big reason why its construction could provide more SEO benefit from its links than Flickr’s: the links are not NOFOLLOW-ed! So, Pinterest’s links can convey ranking benefit!

Tips For Local Search Engine Optimization On Pinterest For Local Businesses

• When setting up your profile, obviously you should not select the option to hide your profile from search engines, and you should use good “About” description text with keywords about your business. Also, set the location with your city name (such as “Dallas, TX”), add the URL to your company’s website and connect with your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
• If your website already has fair local rankings, consider using one of your best review pages from a prominent business directory site as your Pinterest profile’s website instead of your company website — doing so could help that positive review page to rank for your name searches.
• Set up Boards using your city name, to collect pics about your area (such as Dallas), and name a Board after your business type, products or services.
• Follow other Pinterest users in your area and Boards related to your areas of interest.
• Try to ”Pin” only good-quality, attractive pictures to your Pinterest Boards. Pinterest is highly visually-oriented, and to get any other users to show interest to your pictures they should be of good visual quality.
• When posting a picture to your locally-named board, describe it with good keyword text.
• Don’t “sing” with only one note — post pictures of other local sights to your board in addition to ones specific to your business. Showing an interest in your overall area will attract local consumers. Photos of local landmarks are particularly good for this. (For example, see this pic of one of the better-known Dallas Landmarks: http://pinterest.com/pin/257690409898241547/ )
• Vote on other good-quality local Pinterest users’ photos by clicking their “♥ Like” buttons.
• Have a good infographic designed which relates to your industry in some way, and use Pinterest to help distribute it.
• If you already optimize via Flickr, you can use those Flickr URLs to post your images on Pinterest — this could help further optimize the Flickr pages to rank well in searches.
• Cross-promote your Pins on Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s a bonus tip: declare a Pinterest contest to customers who visit your establishment — offer compelling prizes to those who post pictures of your business and products.

Pinterest doesn’t provide more sophisticated features found on other image sharing services like geotagging of images. However, I think we can reasonably look forward to additional features which may also be useful for local SEO as the service matures.

It’s possible that Pinterest engineers may have purposefully omitted rel=”nofollow” on the links added by users to the service in order to help lure more usage growth.

Whether this was a strategic move on their part or merely an accident, one thing seems certain to me — Pinterest is likely to add NOFOLLOW to their links eventually, so if you’d like to get a little short term benefit, you had better jump on the bandwagon soon!

Related Articles:

• Using Images for Local SEO
• Is Pinterest The Next Great Place To Get Links & Social Mentions?
• Using Infographics in Social Media to Promote Content and Visualize Data
• A Guide To Geocoding Images For Local SEO

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a “what not to do” article (see What NOT To Do On Local Business Websites). But it’s worthwhile to emphasize some of the things I still see local businesses doing wrong in Google Places, since some of the more common stuff results in needless frustration and delays.

Nine Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings In Google

Again, do not try these at home!

1.  Use a post office box for your address

I know it doesn’t make sense – this should be alright to do for businesses which do not have physical addresses, and you may even find some competitors doing it, but Google Places doesn’t like it. If you register a new listing with a P.O. box, you can expect it won’t rank for many primary keyword combinations. (For background on this subject, read about Google Places and businesses without addresses.)

So, find a street address to use for your business. Use your home addresss (often not ideal for privacy/security reasons), or partner with another business that will allow you to share their street address, or contract with a company that provides mail service with a local address.

2.  Add directions into your street address

Including directions in the street address field (ex: “on corner with Elm Street”) can result in your map location being messed up and/or can cause Google difficulty in linking information from other business directories for your listing.

Either leave the directions up to Google’s automated map features, or include the helpful directions in the description field, if you absolutely must.

3.  Tell Google not to display your address

This often goes hand-in-hand with businesses that use P.O. box addresses, but not always. What’s confusing about this is that Google Places provides this as an option, but they neglect to tell you that it may royally affect your ability to rank. The reason is that they prefer to show business locations on the map, and their algorithm is instantly dubious of any business that obscures its office location.

So, if you’ve traditionally used a P.O. box and are thinking of switching to your home address in combination with not displaying it, then think again. Okay, theoretically, you might be able to develop enough credibility with Google Places to overcome whatever governors they have on rankings for address-obscured companies.

But in practice, this is such an uphill battle with no information or feedback from Google about your status that you might as well avoid the beating at the begining and simply don’t toggle your address display off.

4.  Use product names and place names in the business category field

It’s confounding that these are free-form, and it’s silly that Google doesn’t merely warn you if they detect a place-name in this data field for your Place page. But what Google wants here is just the business type, such as “Accountant”, “Florist”, “Attorney”, or “Electronics Shop”.

Do not put the names of products here (generally), nor your city names, even when combined with the category name. Google really hates this and it might even get you dinged!

5.  Use a call tracking number as your business’s phone number

There are folks that have a fetish for statistical data who like to argue with me over this one, but there continues to be a pretty good consensus among those of us who are expert consultants for local SEO as to our stance on the matter.

Using an alternate phone number makes it harder for Google to match up your data from multiple sources across the local ecosystem, which can reduce your ability to rank.

For most small, local businesses, rankings and performance in search results ought to trump the desire to have tracking to see where your phone calls originate. Performance is a necessity, and analytics in this case is a comparative nice-to-have!

Google has come out and officially stated not to use tracking numbers, too: “Types of phone numbers that should not be included are: call tracking numbers and phone numbers that are not specific to a business location.”

6.  Post some shill reviews in Google Maps

Getting your employees to help you in posting positive reviews for your business, and/or posting negative reviews about your competition, could result in your listing getting flagged by users and automated algorithms.

People can often sense that a review may be false, and this can result them stating their suspicion outright in their own review under your listing, for all to see, or they may report the listing to Google.

Either way, any juice you got from those reviews might get revoked along with anything else you’ve touched in Google. False reviews are against the law, too, so stay away from this dishonest, bad practice. Instead, harness the power of reviews in acceptable, positive ways.

7.  Make radical changes to your business name, address or phone

Changing your address or business name in Google Places is highly risky to the stability of your rankings. Google canonicalization algorithms may struggle to match up your data from across the Web afterwards, and it could even cause your listing to get flagged as potentially compromised or as an attempt to manipulate.

Expect a few weeks of disruption to your rankings at minimum, assuming you can change all the various citation references out there to match. If you can’t get them to mostly sync up consistently, then expect longterm ranking impact and perhaps also ongoing problems in terms of duplicate listings, too.

If you occupy a really great ranking spot, you might consider leaving it as-is.

8.  Add lots of fictional office listings in each city all over your metro area

Once you’ve poisoned the entire pond, the negative effects will eventually come back to roost with the rankings of your real, original location!

You may think you can add listings all over without Google detecting it, but your competitors will “helpfully” flag each listing and tell Google that you’re not really there. Expect to have your faux listings tank in the rankings and they’ll take your real, original listing with them.

9.  Ignore that your map pinpoint location is completely off

You may be an ADD, multi-tasking, stressed-out small business owner, but this is something you’d better pay attention-to or it can irritate potential customers, reduce your walk-in traffic, and even get your listing erroneously flagged as out-of-business before your realize it.

So, check your map location and use the tools to correct it if you’re significantly off.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be publishing this list. After all, these items result in loads of work for those of us in local search marketing. However, untangling borked business listings is more difficult than setting up a fresh, new business profile completely from scratch.

So, avoid these bad practices so that you can spend more energy on further promotion efforts, rather than trying to correct something that’s been borked!

I’ve written in the past about using press releases for improving PageRank, and as a vehicle to get reporters to promote businesses. Press releases are nearly a throwback to an older time period — they follow a moderately standard format and have been used for over a century to announce new developments to newspapers and other news media.

Perhaps it’s this semiformal nature of the press release that makes many small businesses overlook it when planning ways of promoting themselves. But, press releases are not just for large, national companies.

Press releases are a great source of links (when links are included in them). The websites that host press releases can be worthwhile for link weight, and newspapers or other news sites may sometimes publish the entire release as well. In the past, this near-instant PageRank value conveyed by issuing PR was considered very worthwhile.

But incorporating press releases into your marketing mix includes other compelling reasons that go beyond the value of links you might get. (And, as Google and Bing have become more sophisticated, it could be that press releases are no longer high-quality sources for links, and some sites may be “nofollowing” links in press releases when redisplaying them, negating their link value.)

Press releases are a promotional vehicle that can help you gain more attention for your company. When done effectively, they help you attract attention you might then be able to translate into more customers and sales.

Releases can still function in the classic way, by getting the interest of a local newspaper reporter, who could then choose to do a story about your company for his or her publication. In this day and age, press releases can also get paraphrased or reported on by bloggers, too – I’ve had press releases picked up by specialized industry blogs, bringing attention to my topic from communities interested in the subject matter.

For local businesses, press releases can be an effective source for local citations, particularly since they can get picked up by geo-authority websites such as local news.

Finally, press releases can coordinate well with social media, so using services like Facebook and Twitter to push the PR can help generate more overall buzz about your business.

Tips For Using Press Releases For Local Online Marketing:

• Be sure to cover the basics — specify the who, what, where, why and when.
• Naturally, mention the city and other locality names for the “where” to target your local market, and to help develop relevancy in local search relevancy algorithms. Local businesses should include their full street address and phone number near the end of the press release to get any possible citation value from it.
• Tell a story with each press release! Providing a human interest narrative can help get your publicity distributed. Go beyond a terse listing of the facts; write with a wider audience in mind to better appeal to those who might be inclined to push mentions out via their social media accounts.
• Perform keyword research and include the local phrase combinations that best match what more consumers would be searching for when seeking the topics you’re writing about.
• There are many press release sites/services out there. Some free PR sites can be worthwhile, but some of the paid options have advantages as well. Will the release be permanent? Are links allowed? Will it get distribution through news search or major news sites?
• Include images optimized for local search, for press release distribution services that allow it. Some of them allow embedding a video, which is also helpful.
• Including an optimized PDF version of the press release can also help — it can result in multiple pages linking to your site versus one release, and PDFs sometimes get copied and re-hosted elsewhere, resulting in more link options.
• Include a press releases section on your website, and archive copies of your PR in there. This is yet another valuable keyword content source for your own site.
• Include a few links to your site in your press release. You could also include links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts instead of a couple of the links to your site.
• Promote the press release itself once it’s issued, by linking to it, mentioning it in your own social media accounts and sending it directly to local reporters and hyperlocal bloggers in your area. Just exercise due diligence beforehand to be sure you’re sending it only to people who might be interested in it. A press release about a cool new hamburger is not going to be of interest to reporters who only cover city council politics or bloggers who only focus on the local music scene.
• Here’s a tip borrowed from Matt McGee: Only issue a release when you have something newsworthy to report — don’t waste journalists’ time. Since journalists are not the only consumers of press releases any more, let’s take this a step further and avoid issuing press releases that wouldn’t interest your target audiences of consumers, journalists and bloggers.
• Avoid PR fatigue in the public by not issuing releases too often. Also, use different distribution services over time to diversify where your releases are appearing.

Using these techniques can help you in promoting your local business. However, the best press releases are planned with sophistication, savviness and good writing. It can take experience to do a good job of it. If you haven’t done it before, it can be helpful to hire a professional to do it on your behalf.

Incorporating images as part of your overall content mix is a good idea for search optimization in and of itself. Images can provide additional opportunities for keyword signals on a page, and they represent good opportunities for ranking in search results under Universal Search.

But, if they’re also associated with places properly, they can convey additional location signals, helping a business and/or its website to be considered even more relevant for local searches.

If you’ve explored around Google Maps for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that there are quite a few images associated with local places in the interface. Google uses a few different methods for identifying image locations.

If you geocode your images in some way, it gives Google and other search engines high confidence that the content should be associated with a particular place.

Geocode Images With Photo Sharing Services

One of the easiest ways to geocode an image is through using one of the top image sharing services such as Picasa, Panoramio or Flickr. (FYI, Picasa may be renamed “Google Photos” soon.)

In each of those services, you can upload a photo, then add various elements such as titles, descriptions/captions, tags and associate images with locations by dragging them over a map:

When you map photos via these sharing services, they take the longitude and latitude geocoordinates associated with the map location and store them with the image’s information. Google Maps reads in syndicated feeds of the images from these services and then is able to use the geocordinates to pinpoint them in the images layer in Maps.

But you may be wondering, once you have geocoded the pictures in an image sharing service, how should you then associate those pictures with your company?

You could leverage the hosting through the image sharing service, and display them on the pages of your site. Alternatively, you may also link to your site from the image sharing service’s pages. Both of these methods may augment your local search signal, and may be particularly efficacious when used in combination.

Using GPS Enabled Cameras & EXIF Data

In addition to the above, a slight variation on this technique would involve using a GPS-enabled camera upfront in the process to take your photos, and then uploading them into the photo sharing service.

GPS-enabled cameras will store the geocoordinates in the image file’s EXIF (EXchangeable Image File format) data. EXIF is a format for storing meta data about the image, such as date/time of the photograph, type of camera used, the image’s color profile, geolocation, and other info. Flickr, Panoramio and Picasa will all read out the geolocation from the EXIF info, and translate it into the geocoordinates when mapping the image.

Having the geocoordinates in the EXIF data may have some slight advantages to merely mapping a non-geocoded image, because image sharing services like Flickr will publish the EXIF data onto HTML information pages in conjunction with the image — so, the coordinate pair provides yet another crumb of local signal on the pages associated with your image content.

Using An Image Sitemap

Another method which you can use is to store images directly on your website, and then add an image sitemap file which includes a geolocation element for each image.

However, it’s unclear precisely how Google uses the geolocation info from image sitemaps. The XML schema only requires a string for the location, and uses a city and country like this, for example:

Image sitemaps appear to be mainly geared towards enabling Google’s Image Search to find and rank pictures. So, the geolocation code probably only affects how relevant an image is considered to be for a query, depending upon the geolocation of the searcher or if the query includes local qualifiers such as the city name.

It’s possible that you could enter an entire street address into the image sitemap, or even the geocoordinates for more precise pinpointing. But it does not appear to me that the geolocation data with image sitemaps is communicated over to the Google Maps silo at this time, and perhaps using the lat/long coordinates wouldn’t work at all. (If inclusion of a full street address or lat/long coordinates would work, Google should provide more examples or a better description in their help pages covering the topic.)

In the past, some developers might have geocoded their images by storing each image on a separate webpage, and then geotagging the webpage.

However, I consider this a poor technique at present, because it doesn’t clearly communicate to search engines whether the geolocation is specifically referring to the image, the website, or other subject matter that may be on the same webpage. All the other techniques here make it clear that the geolocation is referring to the image itself.

Manually Embedding Image Location Data

Another technique for geocoding an image would be to use an EXIF editor and manually embed the longitude and latitude coordinates into it. Google suggests this as a method for adding geocoded images into Panoramio, so this is not a risky method, even if it may seem a trifle arcane.

There are a number of programs out there which will allow you to edit an image’s EXIF data. Google’s Panaramio documentation recommends Exifer, although the Exifer site says the software hasn’t been updated since 2002.

Even so, it probably would function just fine, so long as it will run on your system. There are other EXIF editor packages, too. Here’s an example where I input the coordinates of the CN Tower in Toronto, using the free version of the Zoner Photo Studio:

As you can see, the software provides a fairly intuitive interface for inputting the lat/long values, and a map interface to dynamically show where the coordinates are plotted. (In Zoner, this interface can be accessed under the File -> GPS menu.)

The map can also be used to pinpoint the picture location by panning and zooming to locate the place and then clicking where the image was shot. (If you don’t know how to get the precise geocoordinate numbers for a street address, refer to my earlier article on How To Geocode An Address & Optimize Location Pages.)

To view the EXIF data for my example image of the CN Tower, you can use an online EXIF viewing service such as Jeffrey’s Exif viewer — click here to check it out. There are various other browser extensions and software packages that can be used to view and edit the EXIF data as well.

Once it’s geocoded, you can upload it to one of the photo sharing services such as Google Panoramio, Google Picasa, or Flickr (you should first enable settings allowing geocoded photos to be automatically mapped when uploaded). Once uploaded at one of these services, it will eventually be automatically spidered and made available via Google Maps.

Be sure that the image upload service you use is now correctly displaying the image’s location on a map, and does not make any mistakes reading the coordinate pair.

Google’s Panoramio instructions indicate that some EXIF data cannot be interpreted by them, so be sure the data is accessed and that the image is mapped to the correct location in Google Maps afterwards (the Google Maps interface that is integrated into Panoramio).

Likewise, the image’s mapped location may be checked in Flickr and Picasa as well, via the map interfaces and EXIF content pages they generate.

Having the geolocation embedded in the EXIF part of the image file may be the best option from an optimization perspective, because it not only allows you to leverage one of the image sharing services to get your images connected with maps, but also because you may then store the image on your website where the locational data might help to further augment all the other basic local SEO methods you’re using.

Schema.org As A Geocoding Technique

Probably the newest image geocoding technique would involve using the schema.org protocol which the search engines recently announced, and which allows you to tag individual images on your webpages using Micro Data. Under this protocol, you could use the ImageObject type and embed a contentLocation property within it to specify the place.

At present, though, I think that the location content is likely not yet being absorbed by Google’s Image Search or by Google Maps, nor by other search engines. While this technique has a lot of advantages, it is still too early to effectively leverage — but, stay tuned and expect that this method may well become a defacto standard along with embedded geolocation in EXIF data.

Thus far, I believe you get more local search benefit from uploading geocoded images to the image sharing services I highlighted here, since they are well-integrated with Google Maps.

However, as the search engines become more sophisticated, and as more cameras (and camera phones) integrate location data in image files, we might reasonably expect this information to be harvested and used in local search ranking evaluations wherever images may be stored on the internet.

With new and emerging technologies, it can be challenging to identify whether integrating them will produce a good-versus-bad ROI. With some experimental interactive marketing ideas, the “law of diminishing returns“ eventually kicks in, meaning you expend progressively more time and effort for lower and lower returns.

If the tactic you’re considering has an extremely nebulous potential return, it might not justify any time spent on it at all. QR codes may fit into this category.

Reasons To Nay-Say QR Codes

They are not a substantial improvement over URLs. At its most basic level, a QR code is a method for communicating and storing a very precise ID to be associated with some thing, such as a product, an advertisement, a business, or an individual. In this respect, it works very similarly to a URL. (They can also store plain text, but most of their best business functions seem to be in the role of ID/product-numbers or URLs.)

For instance, if you saw an ad in a newspaper or magazine that looked interesting to you, you could scan it with your mobile phone, and the app on your phone would translate the graphic code into a URL which you could save or have it launch straight into a browser window on your phone.

While this theoretically could save you from having to manually type in a URL you read off the ad, it’s not necessarily all that much faster (I’ve watched people pulling up the app, getting close enough to the QR code, aligning to snap a pic, etc.). If one frequently wanted to visit URLs found when reading newspapers or magazines, this small time savings could drive one to install and use the app.

But, I’d venture to say that most people reading print media are not in a mode to take notes or go look up websites all that frequently while in the midst of that activity — I think those moments are more sporadic. And, when a consumer reaches that point, it’s not difficult to type in a URL, which incidentally might be easy to remember, too.

Some of the main uses for QR codes where local business marketing is concerned has been the practice of placing QR code decals on storefront windows or in print ads, and the matrix codes are linked-to the company’s website URL. This was pushed by Google Places, and many small businesses got the decals and placed them on their windows in a nearly knee-jerk reaction based on the assumption that if Google thought it was good, then it must be. Or, perhaps it might give them some sort of advantage in Google rankings.

There’s no reason to think that QR codes help in local search rankings on Google or elsewhere. Many marketers are desperate to push against any perceived lever there may be in making the needle move in Google rankings, so quite a number of people fell in line and posted the matrix code graphics on their store entrances. But it likely did nothing for rankings. In fact, there’s reason to believe that messing with your site URL structure to make better QR codes may de-optimize it for search.

Rhetoric around QR technology has been suspiciously hype-laden

The online marketing community’s enthusiasm around QR codes has made it sound compelling and the excitement that all of us have around clever tech is catching. But, there needs to be a good reason to use it or else it won’t have a natural place in consumer ecology.

The short life-cycle arc of the CueCat indicates this could be an evolutionary dead end

The CueCat was the product of a flashy startup during the dot-com era which allowed people to scan in small barcodes which could be later uploaded on computer to sync up with URLs.

A CueCat Scanner used technology similar to QR codes.

I remember when I was called in by the print side of my old yellow pages company to integrate CueCat code with our website for a brief, thankfully-abortive time period. I was so horrified when I realized what it was and how far in bed the print product manager had gotten with the Digital Convergence company that produced the CueCat.

It was so patently obvious that it was a nearly-pointless novelty item that I could not see there being sufficient consumer adoption of the technology to justify the amount of yellow pages ad print space to allow for the barcodes.

So, it was no surprise to me within a mere year or so when I was called upon to vet Digital Convergence’s technology for consideration of being acquired as the company was about to go bankrupt — and I had no hesitation in killing off the proposed buyout based upon technical incompatibility with our server environment and assessment of the CueCat’s complete lack of sufficient consumer adoption.

It’s still horrifying to me how eager some unsophisticated companies were to associate themselves with technology they understood poorly, and how much money they lost from investing in the technological dead-end.

Debbie Barham of the Evening Standard described the basic failure best when she said, “[the CueCat] fails to solve a problem which never existed.” And, that unfortunately seems to describe QR codes, too.

Slight inconveniences with products can amount to huge barriers for adoption

With QR codes, there are a few different inconveniences: you must download and install the app(s) on your phone. You must scan the codes. You must FIND code to scan and be near enough to capture it.

Could it be easier to use? Well, imagine if your cell phone had an app which allowed you to snap a photo of a URL, and then it might automatically launch your browser window with the URL. This isn’t far outside of our current technology.

There must be a compelling incentive for consumers to adopt it

If it doesn’t quite speed up some interation enough, then it needs some sort of premium to bribe users into getting involved.

Google dropped support for QR in Places

After initially pushing intensively to get SMBs to adopt them and use them as decals at their places of business, Google dropped QR code support. If this had been working for local consumers, Google wouldn’t have abruptly halted it. This is a significant indicator that it has yet to hit critical mass.

The vast majority of average consumers haven’t a clue what it is!

Poll the men-on-the-street in your area and see how many of them know what a QR code is and have a QR app installed on their cellphones!

As a unique identifier for people, businesses, things — it likely will not have a long lifespan

For businesses, apps becoming more adept at identifying/linking based upon ubiquitous geolocations, for instance. And, what about RF IDs (a.k.a. “NFC” – “Near Field Communication”)?

Nanotech devices with embedded RF ID detection could offer seemless ID detection and invisibly bridge the gap to connecting with online/virtual info. (There is speculation that Google dropped QR code from Places in order to replace it with NFC-enabled decals.)

URLs have wider recognition and might be preferable to using QR codes in print ads

Unlike QR codes, a URL doesn’t require locating an app, downloading it, installing it, and using it to snap a pic of a code graphic. For consumers who don’t have smartphones or have yet to download the appropriate app, a URL (including conveniently shortened URLs) will work better.

Multiple, warring code protocols result in some consumer confusion

The fact that there are multiple QR flavors may necessitate loading multiple apps to read different codes for different purposes. A consumer who feels unsure of which app to use for a code will tend to avoid participating. A service which requires a degree in Internet technology to use it is a service destined for failure.

Reasons To Believe In QR Codes

It’s easy to find reasons to nay-say QR code. However, it has gained some number of devotees and some growth of users. It would be simplistic to ignore that the technology has a few reasons to believe in it and consider that it might become sufficiently robust to gain traction. Here are a few of the reasons which I think have some merit.

It is an evolutionary step up from the CueCat

QR Codes only require smartphones for the device, compared to the specialized CueCat scanners — so, it is founded on a device which many consumers already have. While this is an adaptive advantage, it’s also insufficient in my view, because I didn’t believe the specialized device was the main flaw of CueCats in the first place — it was their lack of compelling reason to be used.

Still, this incarnation has the advantage of a slightly lower barrier-to-entry, and each incremental advantage helps bring the concept closer to the tipping point where it might finally reach critical mass.

QR code might manage to achieve a necessary degree of cool factor

Just one clever PR stunt could help propel it from the digiterati/early-adopters over into popular culture. There have been quite a few different companies, organizations and individuals which have done something innovative with QR in order to get some publicity buzz.

For example, a few days ago Ballantines whisky company got a tattoo artist to ink a QR code onto a friend which was linked to an animated version of the tattoo illustration:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yet, this is more of a novelty than something which will bring QR tech over the top. Few people have access to the tattooed guy to scan in his matrix and get the animation to launch, so there’s no incentive for people to download the app and play along. For a stunt like this to really convert the non-QR-enabled, it needs to involve a more popular subject and it’s got to get a lot of people interested in making the scan themselves.

There is still some time yet before omnipresent ID technologies catch on and become standard

NFC or some nanotech ID handshake may be just around the corner, but they haven’t arrived. Until then, there may be some useful applications for QR protocol.

Google’s purchase of Punchd indicates it may still have plans for QR where local is concerned

Punchd is a service that has a built-in incentive that can drive consumers to seek out the special QR app, download, install and use — frequently. Mashing up a loyalty program which users can engage with via cellphone makes for a compelling raison d’etre.

Innovative QR code use indicates that the tech could be one small leap away from becoming really useful

A South Korean grocery store, a Homeplus company, figured out that providing busy shoppers with a virtual store in subway stations where they are a captive audience might be solid gold, and enabling the shopping cart functionality by having consumers scan QR codes for each product they wish to purchase is actually a brilliant application.

Now, if someone comes up with an equally compelling application here in North America, you could see QR codes really enter the mass consciousness in a big way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Conclusions

QR codes have yet to achieve sufficiently widespread awareness in popular culture. Their usage  could still grow at a rapid rate as some have cited, but their penetration is still insufficient to justify time spent on integration for most small, local businesses. But, don’t ask me — ask a small, representative sample of your usual customers and see how many of them know about it.

If you’re a small business, consider first if you’re in a tech-savvy industry where your customers will commonly know what this is and use it, or if you’re in a highly tech-aware location, such as Seattle or Silicon Valley. If you fall into these segments, you may fall within a narrow exception case category and this could be worthwhile for you to experiment with (particularly offering Punchd loyalty discounts).

Additional innovative applications like the South Korean grocery use could happen in the North American market, but until that happens this still may not have reached the necessary tipping point to be worthwhile.

Some future innovative stunt like the QR tattoo might manage to tempt large numbers of consumers into trying out the technology, helping it to jump past the tipping-point.

For larger companies with sufficient resources to spend, a QR integration could be used as a speculative experiment similar to the Ballantines company’s tattoo gimmick, and they still might get some publicity/buzz value out of it even if it doesn’t evolve into a more worthwhile medium.

But, for the majority of small, local businesses, this is a speculative curiosity which simply doesn’t yet merit any expense of time/resources to mess with. As such, for most of these businesses any time spent playing with this will translate immediately into lost money.

However, stay tuned on the QR code topic where local interactive marketing is concerned!

Where I could’ve predicted the rapid death of CueCat, the story isn’t completely over for QR yet, and it might yet climb its way up over the tipping-point and make it into a sustainable position in the marketplace here.

It will need something to help propel it further, though — some increase in the ineffable “coolness” factor such as a Lady Gaga full-body QR code tattoo, or virtual shopping malls in subway stations — but, it might still happen.

Don’t Use Vanity Numbers

At all! Vanity phone numbers are those jazzy, personalized phone numbers that use letters instead of mere numbers, usually to spell out some tagline or a business’s name.

These may have come into vogue back in the 1960s or 1970s, and they seemed to work well by providing a mnemonic by which consumers could remember a company’s phone number.

Fast forward to 2011, though, and many cellphones don’t include the letters on the numeric keypads anymore — making it difficult to peck out the phone number if you only recall the vanity version.

Worse yet, it makes it impossible for search engines to associate your phone number on your site with your business listing, and it could impair your SEO. So, vanity numbers = bad for both search engines and customers!

Don’t Put Your Local Phone Number Within A Graphic Image

Designers often wish to use prettier text fonts than what they can achieve through straight HTML, but doing this can shoot you in the foot if this is the only way your local business phone number is included in your site.

For best performance, at least make sure the image containing the phone number includes the number in the image tag’s “ALT” text, and include it elsewhere on your webpage in regular HTML text as well.

Don’t Forget To Update Your Copyright Date

We’re now halfway through 2011, so your site shouldn’t still be showing “2010″ or “2009″ in page footers. Worse yet, it really shouldn’t still be saying 2003! Never updating your dates will make your site start looking stale to search engines and prospective customers.

Avoid Making A Flash-only Website

It’s okay to have some parts of your webpages done in Flash, for example, if you’d like to have an animated banner below your header. But, if your whole website is in Flash, or your main site navigation, it still doesn’t perform well for search engines. Not only that, it won’t work for some mobile phones, and it won’t get properly interpreted to be shown through Google Instant previews, either:

…

Don’t Use “Click Here” For Your Link Text

The text you use in your links can help pass keyword weight to the pages they’re linking-to. Since consumers aren’t searching for “click here”, you’re wasting a lot of opportunity each time you use that for your link text. Try to find ways to label your links descriptively to help the pages on your own site.

Don’t Let Your Website Sit Vacant

Sites sporting “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon” messages for their homepages are only good for ranking badly. Why would you want to send a message to search engines that you might not be opened for business yet? Do what it takes to go ahead and roll out your website, at least with the bare minimum information – including business name, location and local phone number.

Don’t Let Your Homepage Serve Up An Error Or Let Your Domain Expire

These can be signals that your business may have shut down, so it could result in losing some ability to rank. Defunct businesses are one of the hardest issues to solve in online directories, causing nearly all business databases to be clogged up with some percentage of bad listings.

When your business website shuts down, Google may drop your listing in the SERPs to make it less likely they’ll be suggesting erroneous listings to consumers. As such, make a point of visiting your website at least once every few weeks to make sure it looks right.

Don’t Neglect To Pay Your Site Designer Or Host

This should be a no-brainer, but if you don’t pay what you owe, it could result in an error page as described above. Or, worse yet, it could result in your designer messing up your online reputation like this business owner who skipped on his bill:

Don’t Allow Music To play By Default On Your Website

…or we’ll never visit it again. I stole this recent suggestion from Lisa Barone, because it makes me crazy! Half of those of us searching on the Internet are already listening to music we really prefer, so your webpage’s tune is going to interfere with that. The other half of us are surfing from work, and we’d prefer not to so blatantly obvious that we’re looking at your site instead of finishing some report.

Don’t Put Addresses & Phone Numbers In Fine Print

And don’t have them only appear only at the bottom of your webpage. Here’s one extreme example – this site has overly many links in its footers, and they made the smallest, finest print on the page to be their office locations/addresses/phone numbers:

The small print is also barely contrasted with the background color, too. This fine text at the bottom of webpages is not good for usability and not good for your site’s search-engine-friendliness.

Historically, some site owners would cram links and/or keywords into the footers of webpages, in fine print and even making the text color match the background to render it invisible to human visitors. As a result, Google and other search engines are now more sensitive to lots of links and text in fine print which contrasts poorly with the backgrounds on webpages. Avoid doing this.

Keep these various recommendations for “What Not To Do” off of your local busines website, and you’ll make both consumers and search engines happy.

As you may know, citations can be instances where people mention your business’s name and address (or phone number) in plain text on a webpage. Google can treat these citations just as they have treated links pointing to a webpage for determining its popularity or PageRank score. The numbers of pages mentioning a business, and the relative importance of those pages, could be used to calculate a relative popularity score (dubbed “Place Rank” in Google statements and patents).

While I’m oversimplifying Place Rank, an important concept to keep in mind is that an address or place can have popularity that may be otherwise separate from a business that may be located there. For instance, it’s possible that businesses located next to the famous tourist attraction, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood might benefit from proximity to it. So, if you can beef up the popularity of an address, it may result in some ranking benefit for businesses located at that address — sort of like how a rising tide lifts all boats at the same place.

Also, there are indications that links may have become even more important in ranking determination following the launch of Google Place Search. The blending of local search results with web page listings could explain how more traditional page ranking factors may have become more influential in Place Search. Prior to the launch, business listings without an associated website could rank, whereas they seem to no longer be there following the launch.

For local businesses, link-building and citation development is extremely challenging in many cases. Virtually all local search marketing professionals recommend adding/optimizing listings and profiles in major online business directories and internet yellow pages. Yet, once you’ve gotten citations from these foundational local sources, there are limited options for developing more natural links and references for a business. If your competitors have done the same groundwork you have, there may not be much signal to differentiate your company’s popularity versus theirs.

I believe the best kinds of link-building strategy may involve inspiring others to link to you spontaneously, and finding unique incentives for linking. With this in mind, I’ve created a handful of ideas that could get you more links and citations.

10 Unorthodox Ideas For Local Citation & Link Development

1. Start hosting weddings and parties or club/community/support-group meetings at your business facility during off-hours. Event invitations posted online often include address locations, so if you have a facility that could lend itself to some extra uses, it could result in more sites mentioning you. Imagine getting listed in a number of couples’ wedding blogs!
2. Provide an ATM or Redbox kiosk at your business location.
   

   Redbox Kiosk. CC-SA Nate, 9/3/2008

   Special service vending machines can provide yet another reason for your location to be listed in special directory pages.

3. Is your business located in an old building? See if you can assemble documentation to have the building declared an historically significant place on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Once your address is listed there, many sites will pick up the data and refer to your place by address, improving your significance profile — this alone could gain you hundreds of address citations! If you don’t meet the guidelines for NRHP, see if you qualify for an official historic building designation with your State or City historic entities.
4. Write a book! I’ve described before how books can be sources of local citations. So, write a book about your unique methods and expertise related to your industry. If you’re lucky, you might even get the various critics around the country to mention your business location when they review your book!
5. Provide free Wi-Fi service at your business. Once your address is a free Wi-Fi hotspot, it qualifies to be listed in a number of hotspot location directories, such as JiWire’s registry.
6. Sponsor a local festival or charity race. Quite a number of local area festivals will include the sponsor’s logo on their homepage, linked to the sponsor’s website. Festival websites are often one of the more popular types of local sites. For example, check out the Nederland Chamber of Commerce’s festival website for “Frozen Dead Guy Days” — local sponsors achieved some really nice links from this.
7. Offer some of your products for sale online, and provide feeds of your inventory to make it easy to syndicate. Quite a few shopping engines and guides will be inclined to accept syndicated product inventories, helping distribute links back to the product pages on your site.
8. Host a geocache on your company property. Doing so can get your location listed in geocaching sites and forums, like this McDonald’s in Titus, PA.
9. Offer special discount deals for local groups and clubs. Give a special deal to your local Rotarians, Shriners, Freemasons, or another association, and they may mention it on their website or post a notice in their newsletter. Association newsletters are often posted on their websites in PDF format these days, and links within PDFs also count in ranking evaluations.
10. Integrate special badges or provide a local guide of places in Foursquare. Offering checkin deals at your locations in Foursquare can encourage interaction activity at your location, too. It appears that Foursquare only provides a business’s Twitter links on individual location pages (see the Dominican Joe Coffee Shop Foursquare page, for instance). However, if you provide a guide of places, you can apparently get a website link among others. See the page for the Dallas Observer, for example.

Hopefully this list will give you a few new citations. If none of these would apply well for your particular type of business or location, perhaps the types of link/citation development tactics can inspire other similar strategies that would work for you.

Google rolled out Instant Previews in November 2010, and a number of marketers immediately began to try to tweak website elements to optimize the preview views and callout text.

Yet other types of sites, such as news publications, were slightly irked that Google deployed the feature without observing “noarchive” requests already programmed into sites (some sites have reason to opt out of allowing cached views of their webpages, and Instant Preview is yet another type of cached view, albeit in something of a large, graphic thumbnail format).

Still, relatively few marketers may have noticed that a discretely unique form of Instant Previews also rolled out for smartphones (supported for Apple iOS4 and Android version 2.2+ devices), and even fewer may have connected the dots to understand the implications of the mobile-only previews of webpages.

First, a few screenshots of the difference between web based Instant Previews and their mobile siblings.

In a regular websearch for “hotels, seattle, wa” on a PC, the instant preview magnifying-glass icons appear beside webpage links listed in the search engine results page (“SERP”):

If you click on the magnifying glass beside a listing, you can see an Instant Preview of the webpage. Here’s the one for the Expedia page in the results:

Here’s the Instant Preview for the Fairmont Hotel in the same SERP:

I discovered that these two pages have been optimized for mobile.

Incidentally, a quick way to see which pages are listed in a set of Google mobile search results is to search for them on Google’s legacy XHTML search interface — the mobile optimized results will have small cellphone icons adjacent to them:

Now, if you look at the Expedia and Fairmont pages, they’re pretty large and complex in layout, so viewing them on handheld devices would not be all that great. Yet, you can see from the cellphone icons that they have been customized for mobile phone interfaces.

If we pull up Google on a smartphone such as an Android, and search again for “hotels, seattle, wa”, this is what we’ll see:

You can see that the magnifying glass icon for the Instant Previews button in Google’s search results is a little bit different, having dots to either side, indicating that the interface allows a sort of pagination for the previewing of each of the pages in the search results.

Since the interface for mobile devices is necessarily small, this pagination functionality is very helpful and allows one to browse through the previews without having to flip back and forth from the regular web search results page.

What’s interesting when viewing the search results on a smartphone with an Android operating system (like I’m using here) is that you’ll get quite a different Instant Preview for the same webpage – in fact, you get the mobile version of the page, for those which have alternate versions for mobile.

Here are the mobile Instant Previews for the Expedia and Fairmont Hotel pages:

In each case, both Expedia and the Fairmont Hotel have optimized for mobile devices, paring down the pages and simplifying to fit a smaller interface.

The implication of Google’s differential Instant Previews for mobile versus regular version webpages is this: Google is still paying attention to whether a webpage has mobile-friendly alternative versions, and they may prefer that version of a webpage for users who conduct searches on mobile devices.

As cellphones have become more sophisticated, and they’ve grown better at interpreting regular webpages for viewing on handhelds, one could make the argument that the need for creating mobile-friendly websites has reduced. The advent of iPhones and Androids has certainly removed some of the pressure on companies to produce mobile friendly sites.

Yet, large/complex pages remain more difficult to use on cellphones, and they don’t look good in Instant Previews in some cases. An example of this is the site for the Edgewater Hotel, which is listed at the top of my search results for the “hotels, seattle, wa” search.

They apparently don’t offer Google a mobile optimized version of their homepage, because their Instant Preview on Android leaves a big blank area at the top of the image where their page has Flash content, which Instant Previews do not yet interpret:

Google’s attention to these details indicates that they have the perspective that optimization for mobile devices is important. The device view screens remain small, and the ways in which people use the devices are different — you’re less able and less willing to consume larger, more-complex media on your cellphones.

You’re less patient with navigating bigger webpages (zooming in and out and having to pan around overmuch), and you typically may not be looking to read lengthy amounts of text when viewing through cellphones.

The fact that there are still a number of different search interfaces for Google on various mobile devices shows that Google believes that user-experience and usability differ for mobile users. And, frequently in Google’s eyes, a more identifiably usable website is a better result for a searcher. Thus, mobile optimization may still lend some small advantage, at least in Google’s mobile search results.

A few years ago, I saw clear cases where mobile-optimized pages outranked non-mobile pages in Google mobile SERPs. The difference now is negligible.

However, I think the advantage to mobile optimized pages will likely be more in terms of ability to connect and convert consumers on wireless devices. This may give only marginal ranking benefit — or none at all compared with regular search on PCs — but it could help you to get someone to choose to click and then to buy.

This Isn’t Rocket Science!

Optimizing for mobile is fairly simple. In fact, it’s so simple that it’s surprising that more companies are not delivering mobile-friendly versions of their pages.

To optimize for mobile search, try the following:

• Perform content negotiation when a user lands on your site — if their accept-header indicates a preference for a mobile flavor webpage, deliver the mobile version of your page to them.
• Google has a separate bot for crawling/indexing mobile versions of pages. So, you can deliver both a mobile version page up on the very same URL you’re using for the regular, full-blown HTML page, as long as you’re performing the content negotiation check on the backend.
• Google has identified a few different mobile-friendly languages which they support, so you’ll want to use one of them: XHTML Basic 1.1, XHTML MP 1.2, cHTML, or WML 1.3.
• Disclose that you have mobile-friendly pages outright. Googlebot-mobile will eventually discover them, but it could happen quicker if you generate a mobile sitemap and then notify Google through your Webmaster Tools account.
• Let smartphone users choose formats manually, if they wish. Provide a link from the regular page to the mobile version, and vice-versa so users can choose to switch.
• WordPress has some plugins that may handle delivering up mobile-friendly versions of blogs.
• Similar to WordPress and depending on your content management system, or the programming language used to develop your site, there could also be freeware programs, modules or libraries that would make it easiest to get your mobile version set up. Using off-the-shelf code may get you up and running quicker, and save you time.

So, let Google’s distinct Instant Previews serve to encourage you to optimize specifically for mobile users. It’s simple enough to add to sites, so there’s really no excuse for neglecting it.