Google Places is a great place to position your businesses online. It makes sure that your local businesses listing can be found in Google.com and Google Maps. However, not all industries may find it good and useful but generally businesses that need to connect with the locals can benefit from it.

Google Places are made simple for ease of the people to get started. In less than five minutes, you may get your business listing in the world largest search engine. In order to do it, please follow the steps below:

Visit the web at http://www.google.com/local/add/ and agree with the Terms. Email address will be asked, thus use the one you want to be associated with your listing. Next, you will see the form like the one shown below and fill up the necessary information.

You will then need to verify your business by mail. Therefore make sure you put in the correct address, so as to receive the verification code via mail. This is to ensure that the business is really located at the area. As this will need to wait for the mail, thus you click continue and verify later to move on.

This is the final section of your Google place listing and there are several parts in this section. The screenshot above shows four options on the left side bar and these are tabs that you can click to fill up your information. No edits will be show until you have verified that you are owner of the business. Other tabs consist of listings tab, offers and AdWords Express.

You will be taken to a new page when selected AdWords Express to create an advertisement and set your budget. Those that are already using AdWords would benefit from this function.

There are a number of tabs on the left with different options and categories, which consist of select your audience, create your ad, set your budget and review your ad. As long as you verified, all edits will enable and your listing will be added into the Google Places community.

Next is optimizing the business listing, which is the same as optimizing a website for Google search. This will allow the business listing to show up top in the search engine result page. Some of the fast way to optimize is as follows:

• Add in High Quality and Relevant Pictures
• Fill in all the information allowed (contact, description, etc)
• Increase the number of reviews through making your Google + page easy to find
• Keywords input needed throughout your listing
• Put in the Google Listing on your website and email signature