Google® Business Solutions All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Listing in Google Maps Local Business Center

In This Chapter

• Putting your business on the map with Local Business Center

• Making it easy to find your business

• Uploading photos and videos into your listing

• Finding your business's unique attributes

Google is global in scope, so sometimes it's hard to think of such a large service being concerned with information that drills down to the most local of levels. Although Google is big, it still pays attention to details. Google uses the Local Business Center to centralize information about businesses in any given area and make that information available on Google Maps. The best part? You can submit your business's information to this vast service and get what amounts to advertising to the entire world . . . for free. That's a great deal.

Adding Your Business to the Local Business Center

To start the process of adding your business info to the Local Business Center, point your browser to http://google.com/local/add. This brings up the screen shown in Figure 2-1.

From here, you can either enter your business information or use a data file to upload information from several locations at one time. If you click the Add New Business button, you can enter your basic business information as shown in Figure 2-2.

If you choose to add several locations at one time, you have to create a feed file. A feed file is a special kind of text file that contains information about your business. Each piece of information is separated, or delimited, by a tab. ...