You may have seen my article a few weeks back, “10 Unorthodox Ideas For Local Citations & Links“. In it, I outlined some unconventional local link-building and citation-building strategies which focus on doing things which might get others to do a lot of your local citation development work for you, and which might also increase the “Place Rank” of your business’s location.

For instance, if your place of business is located in an historic building, you might get it registered with the National Register of Historic Places or you might apply to get it designated a state historical marker. Doing either of those things would get the location intered into dozens if not hundreds of databases and directories, causing the address to get republished in numerous places, resulting in more prominence for the location and your business, by association. I’ve used this sort of tactic before to gain local citational references from Wikipedia.

This has been one of my secret tactics – most businesses may not merit an article in Wikipedia, but their building just might. And, Wikipedia content gets redistributed simply everywhere — even into Facebook! (Yes, Wiki links are nofollowed, but are local citations, hmmm?)

These round-about link-building ideas require some effort on your part to accomplish — they won’t happen in an instant click. However, they’re fairly robust and have some viral characteristics which can mean that you’ll focus on one project which may result in multiple high-quality links and citations.

So, what are some other, similar tactics you can use to nab some astonishing numbers of links and citations? Here are three more, in the same vein:

• Install weather monitoring equipment and become a weather reporting station. You’ll have to buy and install some hardware correctly, but once you do you can feed the weather data into the Weather Underground and other distribution channels, and they’ll begin showing your location on their sites!

  For instance, the JohnDory Vineyard in Sebastapol, California, has a weather station, and the weather data gets displayed on many sites, including KOAA, TV station sites, and newspaper sites. For instance, they’re listed on a weather page on The Post and Courier — a news site — which links straight to their homepage:

  

  Should I mention that many of these links back are nofollow-free?! 🙂

• Add a cellular antenna to your property. As with historical marker locations, there are websites out there which specialize in pinpointing cell sites where mobile phone antennas or wireless phone towers are located. Even more aluring, companies will pay you for the privilege of putting their cellphone antennas on your property! What could be cooler than having someone pay you to give you more local citations?

  For instance, see the CellReception.com page for the Prudential Tower building at 800 Boylston St. in Boston, MA:

  

  An even more striking example would be the Epiphany Lutheran Church in Lake Worth, Florida, which erected a 100-foot-tall cross at their building which camoflauges the cellular antenna inside it:

  

  Epiphany Lutheran further leveraged their unique wireless installation by sending out press releases about the cross antenna and holding a dedication ceremony for it. Their story got picked up and reported on by a number of news organizations.

  I also know of at least one church here in the Dallas area where I live that has a cell tower hidden in their bell tower, so this may be moderately common for churches.

• Install a webcam at your place of business. This can qualify you to get listed in a number of local and national webcam directories with links back to your business website. This is one of the easiest things businesses can do to attract links and also more site visits (and user interactions with your site can provide other rank-enhancing signals, too). For example, check out the Waikiki Beach Cam provided by Tiki’s Grill & Bar in Hawaii:
  

  Or, the cam from atop the Yamashiro Restaurant with fantastic views of Los Angeles:

  

  This tactic likely will require one to do the groundwork to register the cam with various directories. But, it also provides some other advantages in that the cam may provide video and photo content which may be used for additional optimization work.

You can see that these various local citation-building ideas have some characteristics in common. They give people more excuses to list information about your business and it’s location. There are more things like this which can be done for similar effects — can you think of any?