Well, many people do! So here’s the trick – you actually need to follow Google’s Quality Guidelines! So, let’s spend some time reading the quality guidelines.

Business Listings in Local Business Center must have correct information about physical, local businesses, as they appear in the real world. Google reserves the right to suspend access to Local Business Center or to other Google Services to individuals or businesses violating these guidelines.

Ownership

Only business owners or authorized representatives may claim their business listings on Google Maps.

Business Name
■ Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
■ Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business into the business name.
■ Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.

Physical Location
■ Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.
■ PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
■ Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
■ Businesses that operate in a service area as opposed to a single location should not create a listing for every city they service. Service area businesses should create one listing for the central office of the business only.
■ Businesses with special services, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
■ The precise address for the business must be provided in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
■ A property for rent is not considered a place of business. Please create one listing for the central office that processes the rentals.

URL & Phone
■ Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible. For example, you should provide an individual location phone number in place of a call center.
■ Provide one URL that best identifies your individual business location.
■ Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.

Custom Attributes & Description

■ 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, address or category fields.
■ Please see this page of the LBC User Guide for examples of acceptable custom attributes.

Best Practices
■ Use a shared, business email account, if multiple users will be updating your business listing.
■ If possible, use an email account with a domain that matches your business URL. For example, if your business website is www.giraffetoys.com, a matching email address would be you@giraffetoys.com.

So what’s going on if your listing looks fine and it follows the guidelines but it’s not being accepted? If you look under Best Practices above, you will see that it says – that you should use an email account that matches your domain when possible. We couldn’t agree more! We actually had that experience putting Zippie Interactive on google local listings. The one thing that allowed Google Local Listings was by just using an email that matched the domain of our website! And then with a snap of a finger, Google accepted our listing and is now live!

So here’s our little guide that you should follow:

Step one: Sign up with Google accounts using your email that matches your site’s domain (if possible).

Step two: Follow the Google’s Quality Guidelines above.

Step three: After activating your account, it shows that its flagged and not active  and you know that you followed the guidelines to the T – go into Google Local Listing Help and start a thread saying that you followed them all and you see nothing wrong with your listing. This seems to work well with other people. Google employees scout those and by making a message like that, triggers a response on Google’s team to review it and they either deny your listing or make it active. If they deny it, they typically tell you why in response to your question.

Hope you get your listing activated as it does help with Local searches!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), has a huge – I mean huge impact on whether people see your website or not. This being said, it’s incredibly obvious that SEO should be considered when you start the process of building your website. If you built a website for business related reasons, please read closely. You want to start making more profits, right? How do you think that will happen? Just throw a website online and expect to get paid within the next 24 hours? Well, that’s not the reality. In order to people find and buy your product, this is what you need…

1. A trustworthy website – give a reason for a customer to trust that you will deliver a product they expect when they read what your product has to give. This means:
   • Nice design
   • User-friendly interface
   • Quality information
   • Security and Reliability
2. TO BE FOUND! This is where SEO comes in, you can do much work to get your site to the top of search engine rankings through the means of organic SEO and/or PPC campaigns and advertising to your targeted audience. It could take some time to accomplish this.

So just with what I have mentioned, I hope that you realize that SEO plays a huge part in whether you website is a success or not.  And that my friend – is why SEO should be important to you.

Firms are always looking for new, hip talent. Someone with an edge to their work that will set new trends. But first, you have to know how to work those robust programs. So if your searching on the internet for tutorials – you’ll find many crappy tutorials and you will find many, many good and useful tutorials to add to your library.

Although, searching for tutorials can be an energy drainer – and takes time! So it helps if you know of sites that you can actually go to for nice tutorials. We would be glad to share a few with you, if you have not already found them.

Photoshop Lady – A huge collection of many different wonderful tutorials, a bonus to this site is that you can keep an online bookmark of your favorite tutorial.
Tutorial9 – A great selection of tutorials, but they also provide a “School of Photoshop” section for those who are much more new to Photoshop.
PSD Tuts – Another great selection of tutorials, and they have a whole network of tutorials sites directed toward a specific media (i.e vectors, music, photography).
PSHero – Once again, another great selection of tutorials.

These are great sources to visit for your tutorials, but sometimes you might miss a really wonderful tutorial elsewhere on the web. So why not have it come straight to you?

What do I mean by that? Well Google has a service called “Google Alerts“. You can set it up to where it will email you (or do a RSS feed for) anything new that has been published on the web (you can customize what type of media you want). It is pretty self explanatory to set up, its that simple.

We wish you the best of luck learning more about Adobe Photoshop! It is truly a wonderful program! There are plenty of great sources to help you learn Photoshop (for free).

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Written by:  Heather

There are many people that don’t realize how difficult it is to get a good and successful online presence with the general public. If you aren’t already a big name brand company – you will notice that it feels more like a war to get to the top of search rankings. It is that tough in the SEO world. So here are the must haves to better your chances for a greater online presence than what you have now!

1. SEO Friendly Design
2. SEO Friendly URLs
3. Easily Accessible for ALL people
4. QUALITY CONTENT – Information worth reading
5. Attractive Design
6. No Missing Pages or 404 Errors!
7. No Construction Pages!
8. Easy Navigation
9. Images – Not too many either! But enough to keep the reader looking.
10. Sitemap for Google

These tips will either give you good points with the readers or with search engines, or even both! Either way these are 10 Must Haves for your website to become more acceptable among the online community and Google rankings.

Note: Just doing the above things, WILL NOT ensure your desired place in rankings – it will only help. Like I said, the SEO world is war.

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Written By: Heather

Work can get pretty boring and people are very creative in finding ways to amuse themselves and their friends! Follow the following link to an awesome list for cubicle pranks. You will absolutely love it and perhaps be inspired to think of something else creative.

Office pranks

Here at Zippie we appreciate all the humor the internet brings us.  Here’s a summary of 2009’s best internet/interweb lists.

http://www.nerve.com/dispatches/nerveeditors/the-top-20-internet-lists-of-2009/index.asp?page=1

Yes, Google is still the top search engine you want to target with your businesses SEO.   Google has a hold over 50-60% of all internet searches.  Bing and Yahoo hold the remaining portion of web searches and utilize many similar strategies in ranking sites.

Getting your site to rank on the first page for the search keywords that you are targeting can all depends on the popularity of those keywords.  If your business, and other businesses in the same industry, mostly have websites that are merely informational and don’t rely heavily on generating business online then your site MIGHT easily be optimized for a fist page ranking.  If you are in an industry that survives solely on web search and online business then your keywords are probably very competitive and expensive.

What is this meme deal we keep on seeing going around the internet?

Let me give you some examples of memes, because that is the best way to explain them is an “internet inside joke.” The trend with ninjas vs pirates, Chuck Norris, keyboard cat, etc are all examples of internet memes.

If you want to quickly get traffic to your website, stay on top of memes, or if you can create your own meme. If you do text, always use comic sans too. JK

If you want to be exposed to many Memes, take a stroll through 4chan’s ‘/b/’.

Why is branding important to you and your company?

Branding is the bread and butter of any company. Your brand is the first thing that a potential customer sees. Your brand will leave a lasting impression of the consumer as it speaks fully for your business.

Many things must be thought out in the branding process. There are many choices to make including colors, fonts, graphics and how you want to be displayed to the public. When choosing a identity for your company, it’s important that you define yourself based on the goods and or services your company provides.

Through the use of logo design, seals, text logos, color theory, and the right graphical choices, you can make your business stand out above the rest.

There are many different factors that go into what makes a well designed website.  Often when web design is at its most successful succeeds the viewer will notice nothing but the content of the site.  Good design often fades into the background of the content and merely provides a container for the information.

COLOR THEORY

There is truth to color theory.  All good designers carefully consider what colors speak to the core of an organization.  There are many resources online to refer to in looking into what theories mean what and how you can find the colors to match your business or website.

IMAGE PLACEMENT

Image placement is key to creating good design “flow”  and balance to a website.  Notice the feeling of websites that are all text  – they often feels overbearing.  People like to see a balance of visual and textual information on a site.  It’s important to know that the average internet user only spends a matter of seconds to decide if a site is something they want to look further into.

ABOVE THE FOLD DESIGN

“Above the fold” design is a term used to refer to the top area of a site that can be viewed without scrolling.  It is reccommended to carefully place your most valuable information within this “above the fold” area of the site.