Citations Help Your Online Visibility. A citation is a reference to a published, or unpublished source – while more precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears. While with reference to online, a citation is simply a mention of your business that would be the name, address, and phone number and of course a web link would always be nice.
Today, citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms in the major search engines. A business with more online citations will probably rank higher than businesses with fewer citations. It is always better to cite your business on well-established and well-indexed portals / business directories such as
Citations Help Your Online Visibility
superpages, yelp etc. This is to rephrase former Arizona Cardinals’ coach Dennis Green says citations help search engines confirm that businesses “are who we thought they were!”
One of the advantages of the citation is that it validates a business as part of a community. By building citations you increase your chances of improving rankings.
We will highlight this concept of citation with an example: let’s say you have a listing at the business chamber of commerce in your city on their directory. Your business name, phone number, and address would be considered a citation whether there’s a web link, or not. This citation has relevance to the number of searches that are happening in your area. Google wants to know that you’re mentioned in a number of different places online so it is helpful to have citations as they show your website as a viable resource to their user.
Local citations make up a portion of search engine ranking algorithms. This means search engines consider local citations, when determining a web pages relevance to a search. If, you over simplify the explanation of the importance of local citations, you can say that a business with more local citations will most likely rank higher than a business that has fewer local citations.
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