Getting links to your business website from other websites is a powerful way to improve your local search engine rankings. It’s important to know, however, that all links are not created equal.  I’ve created an acronym to help you remember the best kinds of inbound links to improve your local search rankings.

One of the fastest growing signals search engines are using for ranking local businesses is the social graph.  Having a big following of customers connected to you via social networks not only helps your search rankings, it also improves your ability to upsell and gain referrals.  It’s an all-around winner.

Let me show you how to get every customer to join your social network.

(Uh oh, I just realized I may have set the expectations a bit too high.  How about every customer who doesn’t hate you and at least has an email account.)

Getting customers to join your social network is just like selling a product.

You might be sitting on a gold mine of local SEO right now.

Google and Bing say that online business name citations will improve a business’ rankings in their search results.  An online business name citation is a mention of your business on a website without a link.

I know a way to make business citations you already have 100X stronger…

While Google and Bing both use online citations, or instances, of your business name written on other websites to judge the online prominence of your business there is one very clear limitation to doing this.  When your business name is mentioned by itself, they have no idea it’s your business.

I’m often asked what an hCard is, and why I use it on every local business website I create. They’re both pretty good questions so I decided to write an article about it.

First of all, what is an hCard?

The hCard is a way of taking information that is already on your website and “labeling” it so the search engines can tell exactly what it represents.  I use it primarly for business addresses. The human visitors to your website can’t see it, but your address is labeled as such for the search engines.

I’m tired of business owners telling me they have no control over whether a customer goes online and writes a review of their business.  This is FALSE!

With a little creativity, its easy to get lots of customer reviews.  Here’s 10 Foolproof ways to do it today.

#1 – Ask Your Customers For a Review At Every Positive Interaction.

Getting online reviews is a lot like making a sale: if you don’t ask for it, it ain’t gonna happen. This advice probably seems very simplistic but it’s not.  The important part is to actually set the goal to ask for a review from every customer during a positive experience and do it.

Of course it helps your local search rankings when you build a complete profile within Google Places, but it’s also important to consider how your profile convinces people to either pick up the phone and call you or actually make a trip to your business to buy something.

There are many things you can do to make sure that visitors to your Google Places profile will soon become customers.  Here’s 10 of my favorites:

#1 – Upload A Video Customer Testimonial

Every business has at least a few customers that are very fond of the service and willing to speak about it on video. Don’t worry about the quality, in fact the less professional the appearance, the more genuine it will seem.  Use your digital camera, iPhone, or get one of those cheap flip cams and get your customers to say a few words.

I’ve taken some time to identify the ten most important business listings to claim for your business in order to gain the maximum benefit in the least amount of time with your small business local SEO.

There are links directly to the sign-up pages of each business listing website.

For perspective, I included the Alexa US Traffic Rank of each site at the time of this writing.  This is a rank of how popular each website is among all websites visited in the US.

Choosing the right categories for your Google Places listing can make a huge impact on the effectiveness of your listing and the number of search queries you rank for.

So how can you determine the most profitable and appropriate categories to choose for your business?

By finding out which business categories are searched for most frequently…

When someone searches on Google, it’s more likely your business will be at the top of the rankings when the actual phrase that was searched is used in your Google Places business profile.

Of course it would make sense to fill your Google Places profile with terms that people actually search for, right?

So how can we find out what words people are searching for?

By going to Google and asking them what people search for!

Okay, but how?