What is CITATIONS?
A citation is a reference to the source of information used in your research. Any time you directly quote, paraphrase or summarize the essential elements of someone else’s idea in your work, an in-text citation should follow. An in-text citation is a brief notation within the text of your paper or presentation which refers the reader to a fuller notation, or end-of-paper citation, that provides all necessary details about that source of information.
LOCAL SEO CITATION
Citations are one of the key factors in local SEO. Many new SEOs begin their careers managing citations for stakeholders. When set up correctly, citations can be really easy to manage and can lead to improved local rankings. However, if done incorrectly, citations can be a nightmare to clean up. In this guide, I’ll walk you through every facet of citations to help you improve your local SEO strategy.
What is a Google Map citation?
A Google Map citation is actually just a mention of your business name (and optionally it’s address and phone number) on another website. For example, an example of a citation could be a business directory such as Yelp, Foursquare or Yahoo Local where your company is mentioned by name. Local citations don’t need to include a link to your website.
A Google Map citation is data about your business location that’s published across the web consisting of your business name, street address, city, state, zip code, and website URL. Your business citations typically appear in directories and other website resources that search engines use to determine the accuracy and relevance of your business location. Now probably you’re thinking How do I cite Google Map? Don’t worry we’ve got you.
WHAT IS BACKLINKS?
A backlink is any hyperlink on a website that points back to your website. It is a form of citation, in which someone talking about a topic related to you, your service, or your product wishes to refer to your website. Backlinks are one of many metrics used by Google to measure the value of a page. Backlinks are sometimes referred to as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, or inward links. A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. Backlinks are important to SEO.
Above is an example of a backlink that we received from an article on the website Forbes. In the page, the text “Post Modern Marketing” is a link that points to the homepage of our website, postmm.com. That link is an outgoing link for Forbes, but for our website it is an incoming link, or backlink.
Usually, linked text (sometimes referred to as “anchor text”) is styled differently than the rest of the page text for easy identification. Often linked text will be a different color, underlined, or accompanied by an icon – all of these indicate that if you click a piece of linked text, you’ll be taken to the page the text is referencing.
Backlinks are important for a number of reasons. The quality and quantity of pages linking to your website are some of the criteria used by search engines like Google to determine your ranking on their search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher you rank on a SERP, the better for your business, as people tend to click on the first few search results Google, Bing or another search engine generates in response to a search.
Why do search engines care about backlinks? Well, in the early days of the Internet, search engines were very simple, and relied strictly on keyword matching. It didn’t matter how good the content on a website was, how popular it was, or what the website was for. If a phrase on a page matched a phrase that someone searched for, then that page would likely show up in the SERPs. That meant that if someone had an online journal in which they discussed at length how they had to take their car to a “car repair shop,” then people searching for a “car repair shop” would likely be led to that page. But, that isn’t really useful for anyone trying to find a repair shop, right?
Well, to make things worse, website owners quickly realized they could exploit this weakness by resorting to “keyword stuffing,” a practice that involved creating websites with massive lists of keywords, plastered with banner ads. These websites existed for no other reason than to generate ad revenue.
