Google is not just counting links for their local search results in Google Places. Now they’re counting citations, too.

Links, as we all know, are important for organic search rankings. A citation is a mention of a company or website that’s not clickable as a link. It’s just a mention.

Many of us considered them worthless insofar as search engine visibility goes, but that’s not the case anymore. Citations in places like YellowPages.com, Yelp, Merchant Circle, Localeze and others can give your local search listing (the one associated with a map) a significant boost.

We’ve found a handy list of 20 excellent websites where you can easily get citations. Some of them allow customer reviews, too. Encourage your most delighted customers to go and write reviews once you have a listing there. Just remember not to write rave reviews yourself; you’re likely to get caught at that.

For brick & mortar businesses and those that involve face to face customer contact, Google Places (and Yahoo Local and Bing Local) are important sources of traffic. These are the listings that show up next to a map of suitable matches.

Google Places is sporting a new look that also reflects changes in their approach. For example, there’s an increased emphasis on customer reviews. At the same time, Google will no longer re-post reviews from paces like Yelp as it did in the past. Instead, it will be emphasizing reviews from within Google Places itself — with two prominent red Write A Review buttons to encourage that. You can read more about this at Search Engine Land.

Citations are more important now than ever. Citations are mentions of a business, even if they don’t include a link. So in addition to the well-known positive effect of link popularity on your organic listings, non-linked citations can be especially helpful in your local listings.

Hotpot is an extension of Google Places, the local search database of more than 50 million locations in which merchants can claim their businesses, provide their addresses and other information, and engage with customers.

Hotpot adds two important new features into the mix: user ratings and recommendations from friends. Website Magazine points out that this isn’t anything radical; you can do it on Yelp, Angie’s List and several other sites. But it does illustrate Google’s increasing emphasis on local search and Google Places.

It wouldn’t hurt of some of your delighted customers happened to go over there and rate you with a bunch of stars — You and they can get started with Hotpot here.

If you own a local business that does business with your customers on a face-to-face basis, showing up in Google Places can skyrocket your business. Google Places replaces the former Google Local, and you’ll recognize it by the map that shows up for many local searches. Let’s say you’re looking for a business lawyer in or near Springfield, NJ. If you search for business lawyer Springfield NJ, near the top of the listings you’ll find a map with several nearby law firms listed. That’s Google Places, and you can easily see how valuable top rankings there are.

So how to do you get there? Here’s a list of a dozen factors that will help you rise to the top.

1. Claim Your Business – this is an essential first step. You need to claim your listing so that you can make edits to your profile page and add more complete about your business.
2. Local Address & Phone Number — if you’re a franchise the web site may list the corporate address. You need your pages to list your own local address. If you’re not a franchise and if you have multiple locations, add a listing for each with the correct local phone number. And make sure your website matches the phone number in Google Places and has full contact information including your name, address and phone number — on every page if possible.
3. 100% Completion in Google Places — As you edit your Google Places profile page, Google will show your completion status. To get the best ranking, this needs to be 100%.
4. Your Organic Ranking — Where you rank for your chosen keywords in the organic search results has an influence on your local business listing. Optimize your site for good organic rankings in the search engines and you’ll reap benefits here as well.
5. Citations – Add yourself to as many related business directories and websites as you can find for your market niche. With some effort, you can gather enough citations to help you rise in Google Places.
6. The Right Categories — choose categories carefully and be as detailed as you can.
7. Product or Service Keywords in your Description – these should match the categories you selected.
8. Photos – the more the merrier. Photos of your building or storefront, interior office photos, staff, products, etc.
9. Customer Reviews — Ask delighted customers to write positive reviews for your listing. As with photos, more are better than fewer.
10. Your Website — Make sure your website covers everything you enter in Google Places, down to addresses and phone numbers.
11. Your Link Popularity and Resulting Google PageRank — these can also influence your Google Places position.
12. Your Product or Service in your Title — for example, not just Rank Magic, but Rank Magic Search Engine Optimization.

Finally, here are a few recommendations we’ve given to our clients:

• Include your city and state at the end of several of your HTML title tags, especially on the home page and the contact page. So as not to dilute your keyword optimization, add them at the end.
• Make sure you’re listed in the following, as appropriate:
  • Super Pages
  • Yellow Pages
  • City Search
  • Localeze
  • Yelp
  • Angie’s List
  • Judy’s Book
  • Insider Pages
  • Epinions
  • My Huckleberry
• Get customers, clients, or patients to review you in as many of those places as possible.

We’ve written in the past about the value of your listings in local search: Bing local, Yahoo Local, and Google Local (which was renamed Google Local Business Center, and renamed again to Google Places). There are a number of reasons to claim ownership of your listings, and Jill Whalen of High Rankings has written a nice article about this. Here’s just a tidbit:

More useful to the average business owner, however, is the new ability to post messages to your Place Page. This is great if you have an event coming up or just any special thing you want to tell people about. It can be up to 160 characters and it will show for 30 days unless you delete it sooner.

You’ll find her complete article here.

The good news: Google’s rolling out something that should at some point help small businesses in a lot of places reach potential customers online. They’re small, text-only ads of the sort Google often displays, only the trick is that they’re shown when people near a company’s physical location search for a specific type of business.

These ads are shown on Google and Google Maps. The first 30 days are free, you then only need to pay “a flat monthly fee based on your location and business category”. There are no bids or keywords to manage, and you can get a full report on the number of calls, clicks to your ad, requests for driving directions, and clicks to your info window on Google Maps.

The bad news: this service is currently available only in San Francisco and San Diego, California. Assuming it’s successful, look for it to be rolled out nationwide in the future. If your business is in San Francisco or San Diego, here’s where you can learn more and sign up.

Google seems to be focusing on small businesses lately. They’re trying to inspire more enthusiasm over their Local Business Center, and they’ve announced that users in the US who have opted in to receive newsletters will now get a monthly email report on how their business listings performed on Google during the previous month, including how many times the listing was seen, how many people clicked to the website, and more.

You can also get tips for optimizing business listings and other Google products that can help small business owners will be explained.

In a recent article on Search Engine Journal, Ryan Caldwell offered three keys to success with local search.

1. Anchor Text and Authority — get links from authoritative local sites, and make sure the anchor text (the clickable text of the link) contains keywords and, if possible, a geographic reference.
2. Local Links — see what local sites are linking to your local competitors and get links form those same sites.Ryan also recommends you get links from DMOZ, Yahoo, BOTW and Business.com.
3. Local Citations — these are like little testimonials, and they can help alot.  Ryan suggests getting people to give you citations at places like Google’s Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, Yelp, SuperPages and infoUSA.

If you own a local business, it’s important to show up in the local search engine listings. And Google Local gets the most traffic.

Actually, Google Local is part of Google Maps at www.maps.google.com. And Google has some quality guidelines that will make your listings better and hopefully improve your visibility. The full story from Google is here. But these are the salient points:

• Represent your business exactly as it appears in real life. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
• List information that provides as direct a path to the business as you can. Given the choice, you may want to list individual location phone numbers over a central phone line, official website pages rather than a directory page, and as exact of an address as you can.
• Only include listings for businesses that you represent.
• Don’t participate in any behavior with the intention or result of listing your business more times than it exists. Service area businesses, for example, should not create a listing for every town they service. Likewise, law firms or doctors should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
• Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title or address fields.

For details on how to add your site to Google Local, Yahoo Local, and MSN/Live Local, see our earlier blog post here.

If you serve a specific geographic area, like Connecticut, or Boston, or Northern New Jersey, you need to be listed prominently in the major local search engines. Here’s how to do that:

Google Local is actually located at maps.google.com. Yahoo Local is located at local.yahoo.com. And MSN/Live local is located atmaps.live.com. (now it’s bing.com/maps)

Go to each of them and follow these instructions:

Do a search for your company name plus your actual address. For example, search for Skillman Doors, Bloomfield NJ or Total Image Consultants, Boston MA. That ought to bring up your listing, if it exists.

If it’s not there, look for a way to add your listing.
• In Google Local, the link is in a section headlined Can’t find what you’re looking for? And says add a place to the map
• In Yahoo Local, the link is at the very bottom under Local Resources and it says Add a Business
• In Live Local the link is near the bottom left corner of the page in gray type and quite small – you really have to look for it. It says To add or edit your business listing, use the Local Listing Center.

Once you’re at the Add Listing page, enter all the information requested and submit or enter.

But Wait! You’re Not Done!

All three of these local search sites have an option for customers to rate businesses. The more ratings you have, and the better they are, the more prominent you may be listed. Don’t overdo it or try to fake out the search engines by logging in as fictitious customers. The search engines are wise to those tricks and you could find yourself severely penalized.

However, do ask some of your best customers if they would be willing to give you a rating in one or another of these local search engines. Typically there’s a link right next to your listing for them to use. Tell them where to go and how to look you up. And ask them if they would write something nice about you.

After a few weeks, check back in to local search and search for yourself by keyword instead of by your company name – such aslawyers East Hanover NJ or fashion stylist Boston MA. Over time, you should see your visibility improve.