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What Are SEO Citations and How They Help Local Search Rankings? What are SEO SMB ? SEO or search engine optimization is a process that helps your website rank high in the results of search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Search engines give more preference to websites that are regularly updated with relevant content. The process helps in ranking your website higher by using appropriate keywords and phrases, as well as relevant back links and alternate sources of information. SEO can help boost sales by improving traffic flow to websites. More traffic means more potential customers. In this competitive world, a new and better method of getting ahead of the competition is vital for all businesses whether big or small. With the growth in Internet usage, there has been a marked increase in what are called "link farms", which are actually automated web sites that provide no real value to the user other than to provide links. As a result, many citations businesses have been affected. If you're an SEO expert, you know that backlinks are very valuable to any website. Backlinks are essential for ranking high in search engines and getting maximum exposure. What are SEO citations? SEO citations are references, usually hyperlinked, to your website sname, address, and contact details, often shortened to NAP. When the website s URL is included in the citation, the reference is considered to be part of the hyperlink, which can help the ranking of your website among search engines. Now, back to our business. If you're reading this article, it means you either own, run, or manage a website. If you own a website, you need to make sure your content is relevant to the keywords in your niche (you can use Google's keyword tool to do this). In other words, don't stuff it full of keywords. If you want to use NAP citations, you need to make sure it is relevant to the page the link is on, but more importantly, it has to be linked from a reliable resource such as a social media page, a blog, or a forum. You don't want to get a bunch of links from the wrong places! For business owners who own small businesses, it can be especially difficult to meet all the demands of having an online business. One of the easiest solutions to this problem is to get a few one-way links from popular, high authority websites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. By doing this, you establish credibility with these popular websites and they will in turn link back to you or your site. As these popular websites continue to get higher rankings, more backlinks will be generated for your website and your backlinks will outlast those of your competitors. In addition to this, many business directories have rules against reciprocal links (i.e. if you give someone else's business a backlink, you cannot link to them yourself). So how does a small business owner increase his or her chances of ranking high in local search engines? The best way is by submitting to directories that are well established and have lots of traffic. These are typically known as regional or business directory sites. For example, if a person owns a small pizza shop in the city of Springfield, they may want to create a profile on a local business directory so that they can rank high for pizza. However, this will not be the best strategy for a person who owns a law firm in downtown Toronto. So now we know what SEO Citations are and why they are important to local search rankings. Now it's time to learn about how you can use them to rank higher in Google. When you submit an article to a local directory, the article will go into a category. This is how the search engine works. If the category your article is listed under has plenty of relevant websites, Google will pick your article up when it does a search for that category. And voila, you will receive lots of targeted traffic from that single submission. It is also important to remember that what are SEO citations makes local SEO more difficult because it requires some extra effort on your part. If your article is picked up by Google, you need to make sure that your keywords are used appropriately in the body of the article. This will help to rank higher for that term. Just make sure you do this consistently and that you submit to the right directories.
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