The Roof Cleaning Institute Of America Training & Certification Forum
"Find A Certified Roof Cleaner Directory"

Citations
Citations: Are the number 1 thing you MUST do to get a coveted A-Z balloon for your local area. Citations are local directories that "cite" your business name along with it's address.

Despite what others say you do NOT need to be in the Axciom or infoUSA database to achieve high rankings, although I do suggest that you at least submit your business listing to these companies for further "proof" of your business' physical location.

Axciom and infoUSA are considered by many to be "the" trusted sources for business' physical locations, but typically take at least 6 months for them to verify and pass your information along to Google.


Here is a list of places that I have been using for local citations:


merchantcircle.com
cityslick.net
aboutus.org
citysquares.com
google.com/profiles/
getfave.com
fastpitchnetworking.com
superpages.com
facebook.com
brownbook.net
local.yahoo.com
wikimapia.org
tjoos.com
squidoo.com
yellowpages.lycos.com
kudzu.com
crunchbase.com
naymz.com
gomylocal.com
ibegin.com
hotfrog.com
ezlocal.com
businessdirectory.bizjournals.com
busiverse.com

many local yellow page type sites, e.g. cityname business directories

Some, but not all of these sites also allow you to drop links back to your site as well. My current favorite is merchantcircle.

Reviews
Reviews are the juice that propels your site higher in the local rankings with all other things being equal.

Good reviews as well as negative reviews (at this time) can currently give you that little edge to push you into the top spots for google maps.


Complete Profile
A complete profile helps in the sense that their is literally nothing more you can add to your profile to make it any better.