This is a follow on from the posts – How I started in SEO, Always Expect The SEO Bubble To Burst, TJ You’re a Genius, Building a Business Directory , V7ndotcom Elursrebmem Competition, The Google Minus 30 Penalty, We had no Google Webmaster Tools, Sim64.co.uk Mothballed, Giving up the Day Job, Business Directory Listings Explode, No More Self Editing, Released From The Google Minus 30 Penalty, Sim64 The Start of the WordPress Years and SEO, Why I don’t like doing SEO for other people – Go back and read those 1st.

Setting up Google Maps Listings

Whilst concentrating on Local SEO it became obvious that Google Maps Listings (as they were commonly referred to back then) were important.

I started researching Google Maps, in particular how you could add businesses to them and learnt the best way of optimising maps listings so they would appear high in the Google results when searching for Service Location type key phrases.

This gave me the idea setting up a Google Maps Optimisation website up, which at the time ranked high for Maps Optimisation, Google Maps Optimisation, etc.

As per usual though, I got distracted by other things, never did anything with the site and the rankings dropped 🙁

Whilst playing around with Maps Listings though I realised the guidelines were quite strict and the fact you had to use your Google account to set them up meant it was risky to abuse the guidelines, that said, I found that as long as you were smart you could still achieve high rankings whilst staying within the Google Maps Guidelines.

Google+ Google+ Pages and the changes to Google Maps

Google+ was supposed to be the new Social Network to rival Facebook, within months though marketers were all over it and Google created Google+ Pages which could be used for business purposes.

Follow my SEO Story here – Google Plus Google Author Rank and More