It makes perfect sense that we do what we can to get to the top of Google. We work with our meta data, we try to build backlinks, and we clarify our keyword density. At the same time, it's also important to maintain some semblance of a user friendly website that is actually useful to visitors.

What makes things difficult is when these two goals are at odds with one another. A recent blog post was written by Ted Ives talking about the relationship between search rankings and driving directions. It's quite the lengthy post, but the crux of it is that Google does place some weight on how often customers search for driving directions to your local business. This is directly connected to Google Places and local search.

This doesn't mean that you can try to game the system from your own computer, constantly searching for directions to your business over and over again. Google will filter for that. It also wants to see a mix of mobile and desktop searches, searches from different locations and distances, and searches from a variety of entry paths.

The irony is that embedding these driving directions from Google Maps onto your website could actually harm your SEO. Google can see that the search for directions is coming from your site. Using the API is much the same. For the purposes of SEO, it's better if the customers copy your address and paste it into the Google search themselves, and the only way to encourage that is not embed a map or any link to a map on your site. But that hurts the user experience.

If you were an SEO and a local business owner, what would you do? What helps you more in the long run?