the sephone blog

With the growing features of Google Maps and the interest it is generating, we have been asked “How to get added?”- Here are the instructions, straight from the mouth of Google!

We gather business information from numerous websites, Yellow Pages directories, and other sources to populate Google Maps search results. If you’d like to be included, you can easily enter your information into our online Local Business Center for free. Here’s how:

• Visit the Local Business Center.
• If you already have a Google Account, sign in with your email and password.
• If you don’t have a Google Account, click Sign up for an account now.
• Follow the instructions to create a listing.

Please remember these points:

• The street address you enter will be shown in the Google Maps search results.
• If you already have an AdWords login address and password, you can use it to log in to the Local Business Center.
• Once you’ve submitted your business information, you’ll need to verify the listing before it goes live. You can verify using a touch-tone phone, SMS, or a PIN that will be sent via regular mail to your business address. Once the listing is verified, your information will normally appear in our results within six weeks.
• You must be able to receive regular mail at your business address if you are unable to verify by phone or SMS. A post office box can be used to register. The address you enter in the Google Local Business Center will be the address to which your PIN mailer is sent, and it will also be the address displayed in Google Maps results.

Want to add more than 10 business locations? You’re welcome to submit your information as a bulk upload through the Local Business Center. For information on creating a bulk upload, please select ‘Upload a Data File’ in your Local Business Center account and then follow our bulk upload instructions.

• The Google Local Business Center is currently available only for businesses in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan.
• For information about adding your website to Google, please review the Webmaster Help Center.
• There’s no charge for Local Business Center listings. Google doesn’t accept payment to include listings or sites in our search results. However, we do offer locally-targeted advertising through our AdWords program. With AdWords, you can run your paid ads near our unpaid search results, and your ads will be clearly marked as sponsored advertising.

If you have a website, I am sure that you have heard of “SEO” (search engine optimization). One of the very best search engine enhancements that you can have is have a site that just follows the guidelines correctly. Google has a whole set of guidelines here. Here is a very simple summary of the most important things that google recommends you do.

• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Make sure your site is crawlable without javascript, cookie or image support.

So there are some simple things that can help your site to be seen by search engines.

One of the easy ways to change how your site appears in search engine results is to change the metadata for your site’s pages. Sephone’s content management systems (datAvenger and datAvenger lite) allow you to change this information for any page on your site.

There are three main pieces of metadata for every page: the title, the description, and the keywords.

The page’s title is what appears in your browser’s title bar when you visit the page, and it also appears as the default title if you create a bookmark for the site. In the search engine world, the page’s title is what appears as the link to your site in the search results.

The page’s description is a short summary of what visitors would find on the page. This is often the text that appears underneath the page’s title in search engine results pages.

The keywords are a set of comma-separated words that describe the content of the page. Keywords used to play a major role in where your site appeared within search engine results, but now search engines rarely (if ever) look at keywords when visiting a page.

Setting meta data in datAvenger

datAvenger 4 gives you complete control over sitewide and page-specific metadata. To change the metadata on any page, edit the page in the Architecture tab and then click on the + button next to “Metadata”. datAvenger automatically generates a page title for you, but you’re free to change this if you like. You can also add keywords and a description in this space.

You also have the ability to specify sitewide meta data for any pages that do not have page-specific meta information. In the Globals tab, click on the blue META tab. Here you can specify a default title or a sitewide title prefix or suffix. datAvenger will show you a live preview of how your title will appear as you change these fields. You’re also able to change default keywords or the default description in this section.

Unless you’ve been given meta data from an external service, you can leave the “Custom Tags” field blank. This field is for advanced users who receive HTML meta data tags, and it can cause your page to display incorrectly if it is not entered in the right way!

Setting meta data in datAvenger lite

datAvenger lite 3.5 gives you the ability to edit meta data for any of your pages. Click on the <M> button after selecting any page in the Content tab. You’ll then have the option to specify a title, keywords, or a description. Like in datAvenger, leave the “Custom” box empty unless you’ve been given HTML meta data tags to enter!