Citations are the New Link

When small businesses are looking for new ideas to create more traffic for their website, their marketing team is more likely to consider new methods of search engine optimization to make their website appear more often when certain phrases are punched into the search engines. This is not an uncommon small business marketing idea, and often is also considered by even larger corporations.

When sites use SEO, links from those sites and other places where their business is mentioned is weighted against that of other sites; thus determining where it ranks compared to the competition. Each search engine has their own formula for determining the ranking of sites, but recently Google and Yahoo have been changing the way that SEO affects different sites in their ranking.

Recently, citation has also been affecting the way that different business sites are ranked in a search. For businesses that are unfamiliar with citation, this is not using certain keywords or phrases, but rather the use of a business’s name, address, and phone number. Commonly, this information is found in sources such as the yellow pages, white pages, and other directories that are not linked to the original website.

For those considering new small business marketing ideas, this has been intriguing since these citations tend to rank equally with other sites, even though they are not connected to the business. This has lead many SEO writers to consider changing their own views on small business marketing ideas. It is also encouraging employers to also post information on different resources that may not be directly connected to their business.

Many businesses that have had high search results seem to have more citations than inbound links. This is proving that Google and Yahoo are webbing their search to smaller sites in keyword and geographic niches; giving sites with more geographic citations more weight.

Proof of this has brought some change to small business marketing ideas, making it beneficial for businesses to look at posting information in more local forums and blogs to help increase their chance of being noticed by the search engines.

Before, many who study small business marketing ideas thought that this technique was a waste of most business’ time since this information had little weight in search results. Through experimentation, however, it is proving that this is no longer the case.

With the new development of these citations, it is becoming beneficial for sites to interact more with organizations in their community. A popular small business marketing idea that is occurring with citations is businesses joining different organizations in their community for free or creating organizations that place their geographic information on websites. Much of this is still experimental, but it is proving to so far be beneficial to those SEO writers who are willing to experiment with this new small business marketing idea.

It is unsure where this will lead in the feature, but it is believed that Google is starting a trend that will soon branch into other search engines, since Google and Yahoo have already been confirmed to cross reference citations and links across one another for accuracy. This is good news for many small businesses and ultimately means more traffic for them in the very near future.

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