[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect]

A slight feeling of embarrassment originally kept me from publishing this tip, as it is based on my own experience as a beginning local guide, and as I felt really silly when I figured out what the solution was. But then I noticed on the Connect forum that there were several occasions where a local guide posted that (s)he was facing exactly the same problem. So I will confess to it after all.

When you add a new point of interest, one of the mandatory fields is ‘category’. You can’t submit the information unless you add something in that field. And obviously you want to add the best fitting category. But the problem seems to be that the list you get presented to choose from is quite short and only contains some general categories (Restaurant, School, Bank, etc). Some very basic business categories like ‘Hair salon’ or ‘Accountant’ are simply not listed!

This was an easy one – and in the “default” list: bank

If you’re at this point, you have made the invalid assumption – as I had initially done – that the categories in that list are the only ones you can choose from. They are not. Not by far. You should really only look at them as a kind of frequently used categories that are shown as examples. In reality you can access almost 4.000 different categories in English (or 3.000 in most other languages). The only thing you need to do is start typing the name of what you are looking for. In the hair salon example, typing ‘hair’ will certainly show you the category you are looking for. Yes, it is that easy.

The original article can be found here

Disclaimer: the practices described here as best practice are my personal interpretation, and I don’t claim any level of official endorsement.

[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect]

Selecting the correct category for a point of interest (POI) can be challenging. Sometimes there simply is no category label available that perfectly describes the main characteristics of the POI. An example from my own experience is a particular type of vending machine that you find all over the place in Belgium: one where you can buy bread. Some types of vending machines have their own category (such as coffee vending machine and beauty products vending machine), but not this one (probably also because you don’t really find these in any other country) – and neither is there a category label for vending machine in general.

In other cases the difficulty is that different category labels are available for what basically is the same type of POI. So far, no one has been able to explain to me the difference between a DIY-store and a home improvement store. Feel free to leave a comment if you can shed light into the darkness on this one!

Image by stratman² (2 many pix!) on flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The issue I want to point in this post, however, is that quite a few points of interest have a category which is not incorrect as such, but also not the best possible one. In almost all cases, the POI then has a general category, where a more specific one is available. Let me give you 2 examples:
* car dealerships: those often have the general car dealer or even garage, but for most popular brands there is a specific category: Ford-dealer, Volkswagen-dealer, Toyota-dealer, etc. (Google doesn’t seem to like French cars, though: Peugeot-dealer and Citroën-dealer are not available)
* sports clubs: these often have the general label sports club, but several popular sports have their own label: football club, tennis club, karate club, etc.

Adding a missing category or replacing the existing one with a more relevant one will bring you 5 points, so you should definitely take this into account when collecting local guides points.

The original article can be found here

Disclaimer: the practices described here as best practice are my personal interpretation, and I don’t claim any level of official endorsement.