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Is it best practice to post your news release on your website THEN submit to distribution services/news sources, or, wait until it gets out there then just put an announcement on your website with an excerpt, and then link to the PR on the most prominent news site?

Anyone tried to decipher the factor in the default sorting order on Yelp?  I've not done any formal testing but from experience my gut feel is as follows (chime in with your own opinion based on your own observations). On searches - #1 factor is of course keyword(s) appear in category business is in or business name
After that, or for just browsing categories 30% proximity of business location to location entered in address field
20% number of reviews and average rating
20% if they are paying Yelp for any services - the is unfair but I'm pretty sure it's a factor (call to action button, advertising, etc)
15% Business Profile is filled out 
15% keyword (if using search) appears in specialties section (which interestingly Yelp started charging to display!) This is a TOTAL GUESS.  I'm wondering if these factors may effect it: Quantity photos and/or keyword matches photo captions How long business has been listed on Yelp How long ago business was started Whether a street address is entered or not (a factor of Google Local Results I think)

My guess is you want to do the  {title} | {company name} format as I would suspect Google gives slightly more weight to the words at the beginning of the title?   (This is assuming your company name isn't a generic word or you are specifically trying to rank your home page for your company name when it isn't ranking well already) But what about cases where you have like 5 or 6 keywords that are really important and used in the title gives you like 50 characters and your company name pushed it up to like 65 increasing the chance Google will use some other source to list the name of your home page in the search results? Obviously one can experiment, but wondering what the general consensus is - long keyword title, or longer title with company name?  The company name can be included in the meta description and the domain name of the url displayed also gives the indication to the company.  But maybe the algo "respects" long itles that have company name more than ones without as then it looks more like a keyword stuffing title?  So many factors to consider.  Yes - on page SEO isn't just about the title, but for this thread I'm just talking home page title.

Our business is in 10 cities.  We offer identical services in each city, there's absolutely nothing different about the services we offer based on location.  We have a contact page for each city with a bit of unique content (phone, address, photo of city, list of counties we service).  It really would be a grey area to create subsites for each city and try to rewrite the service description content 10 times.  However, we want to improve organic results.  We of course have Google Places listings for each city. From an on-page SEO perspective, wouldn't it only have the possibility of benefiting, not hurting local SEO but add the city name linked to that city's contact page in the footer?  I've seen arguments against it, and could see maybe if you were in like 50 cities instead of 10, but is there really any observed downside to doing that in the footer for every page?  We can't title the difference service pages with the city name in the headings or page title, so at least we'd have anchor text in the footer.

We've expanded our business to be in multiple cities.  We are tracking our local rankings in each city and have Adwords campaigns for those cities with location extensions.  We have a separate contact page for each city but haven't setup landing pages for each city which would be fairly tricky as our services are identical for each city.  So really the landing page would be almost identical to our home page content with maybe a photo of the city and the city's name thrown in here and there - definitely a risk of duplicate content detection. What I'm wondering is if anyone knows if there a Google Analytics report we can run to show us links from our Google Places for Business Listing segregated by location?  My guess is that we would need to make each URL for each Google Places listing unique to that location, like http://www.oursite.com?{name of city}  Or is this not even necessary by using some report settings in Google Analytics? -- update -- Well this is a 7-year old article but I suspect it might still basically hold true?  In other words, it's not easy and straight forward.  What I'm wondering is, if I use the ?{cityname} URL only in my Places listings URLs, well, let's make it ?place={cityname} then really all I need to do is run a report filtering by URL contains ?place=    Can it really be that simple because if it is, then this old article and others like it seem to be really over complicating the strategy for simply seeing your googe places listing traffic in total and by location? https://moz.com/blog/tracking-traffic-from-google-places-in-google-analytics Furthermore, if we plan on eventually building home pages for each location, maybe the better URL structure would be mysite.com/places/{city name}  and just do a 301 to the home page until the custom page is built.  The big question then arises if we are only using this URL in our Google Places listings does it have any farther reaching effect on Google's organic view of our website?  In other words will it try to add a unique Google Places URL to the organic results database?  Will it cause a suspension of the Google Places listing?  If we create the URL as an alias to the home page instead of a 301 will it risk dupe content penalty.  Wait a sec... if we use a 301 won't that render tracking in Analytics useless as it's only then going to count the pageview for the home page and not the original URL, right? I guess we could use an alias and then in the robots.txt dissallow indexing of any URLs with /places/  ? Now I think I'M over complicating things.  Seems like the best/easiest/safest method is to just a ?place={city name} to the Google Places URL. Then once we have unique places landing pages, just go update the URL in all our places listing.