Hi Miriam.

I agree with  your gut feeling. What is wrong is wrong and one should not play games falsify facts and present them as true.... not at least with Google. They are smarter than everybody of us out here.

I'll stick with the following tactic:

• Find a person or a partner in these countries who is ready to genuinely partner with me... or at least is willing to take calls, talk to leads and direct them to me. A local listing will be created for this/these guy/guys when we have genuine NAPs.

• Focus on organically promoting my website for these locations without local listings.

Thanks for your help everybody.

KS__

Will it be fine if I add my friends' residential addresses in multiple cities across Country A in Google Places and buy toll free numbers for each of these addresses/cities? So all locations will have different NAP.

Sitting in Country A I want to see how much traffic a particular keyword receives in Country B. Whats the best way to do it?

Also, will the search results differ if I am analyzing the above sitting in Country A viz-a-viz Country B. In other words, will the IP of the country I am making the search from play a role in the results?

Thanks Miriam.

Here are my answers:

1. Are we talking about other countries ... or maybe other counties? I want to be sure I'm understanding if the business is national or international.

Other countries, not counties.

2. Are you meeting face-to-face with customers in the various cities and countries? Can you describe this in as much detail as possible?

No personal contact. I have international numbers listed on the website, so they just give me a call (I use VOIP and Magic Jack) or fill up the form. The conversation begins there.

Hope that answers you.

Thanks for all the help John.

Awesome links Patrick. Thanks.

Thanks Miriam. Waiting eagerly.

Ok. www.mywebsite.com/chicago is better or www.chicago.mywebsite.com? The only negative with the latter is that all pages (FAQ, How it works etc.) within the sub-domain website will have to be re-done with fresh new content while in the first option there's only one page for the location while other pages like FAQ etc stay the same for the root website as well location specific pages.

What say?

Great help Miriam.

Since it has been a couple of since you typed this answer, does it still hold true and 2015? I posted a similar query on http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-rank-for-a-location-country-without-having-a-physical-address-in-that-location-country#reply_297693. Will be great if you could help me out there.

So if I want the website to rate well in Chicago, California and New York, the pages that I should create will be www.mywebsite.com/chicago, www.mywebsite.com/california and www.mywebsite.com/new-york. Is that right?

And when I'm done with that, I have to build location specific links like ' <keyword>in Chicago', ' <keyword>California' etc.?</keyword></keyword>

How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)?

I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it.

Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.

Thanks Keri. I will do so right now.

I have been actively looking at the option of guest blog. Can you help me with where to start? I need help with finding blogs that allow guest blogs, or how to approach them etc

Are they really important?

Many preach they are, and there are tonnes of services out there who give you thousands of forum profile links in no time.

I strictly believe in genuine links built the hard way, and definitely don't want to get into anything which is black hat.

Please suggest if building several Forum Profile Links is an appropriate way of building links?

Thanks for the response Ryan and Keri.

I am new to the world of SEO so didn't know this is considered to be black hat. When I entered this industry, I made a promise to myself to follow only and only white hat practices. Thanks for giving me an insight here.

Are forum / web 2.0 profile links creation a part of Black Hat or using softwares to create them is considered to be black hat.

Please help me out here and I'll do as you suggest.

Can somebody suggest me good softwares for :

1. Forum profile Creation

2. Web 2.0 profile creation

Thanks,

KS__

Thanks for the awesome comments Cyrus.

So what you suggest is going slow and develop solid, long term and genuine links by commenting to blog posts in the same niche, good quality PR submissions. good quality Article submissions and making relevant form posts?

Would you like to add something to the above list?

Thanks Herald.

Please reply to my query regarding Profile Links and Web2.0 Links later down on this page.

What about Profile Links and Web2.0 Links. They say its good to create 100+ profile links every month with appropriate keywords (while SEOing a website). Some say Profile links are better than Form Links or Blog Comments.

If I use services to create them, most of the links turn out to be on not-so-good Websites. But they say at the end of the day its about Backlinks.

My question is: Isn't Google smart enough to detect such practices?

In other word: Do profile links really help?

Hmmm useful tips. Thanks.

How about submitting those pages (URLs) to Linklecious or Pingomatic so they are crawled by Google?

Would that help?

Yup we always do make sure they are DO FOLLOW classified or directory sites.

Thanks for the help. So basically we should continue with them right?

Are directory submissions and Classified Submissions still a good way to create backlinks?

Or they are obsolete methods and should be discontinued?