Chris Smith is President of Argent Media, and serves on advisory boards for Universal Business Listing and FindLaw. Follow him @si1very on Twitter and see more of his writing on reputation management on MarTech.
If you’re looking for a quick improvement in your local business site’s rankings and don’t have a lot of time, you can’t go wrong with making some simple improvements to your homepage title tag. The text within the title tags is one of the top signals used by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines to […]
I was reviewing print yellow pages book usage statistics this week, in preparation for the SMX Local & Mobile conference, and I was struck once again by the large numbers that the Yellow Pages Association (YPA) touts in their press releases and research papers. I’ve had some individuals at conferences dismiss the idea that print […]
The Street View feature in Google Maps has caused a flurry of attention from people ranging from privacy advocates to voyeurs to legislators. The ability to pan around browsing photos shot along streets seems fun and compelling, though it’s also raised all sorts of issues and controversy as our ability to search and process information […]
I’ve been playing around with Yahoo!’s slick new SearchMonkey Application Platform which was first introduced by Amit Kumar, Director of Product Management at Yahoo! Search, at the SMX West conference earlier this spring. Yahoo! hosted a Developer Launch Party yesterday in Sunnyvale to open the platform up to all developers. I created an example application […]
Some users like Mathew Ingram noticed that Google has now added images from Picasa and Panoramio into the bar beside their maps.
Most locally-oriented sites focus their natural search optimization efforts on the big cities of the world — metros like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Yet there is a lot of traffic to be found in the long tail of search queries involving the many tens of thousands of smaller towns in the world. Only […]
Two years ago, my brother was getting married, and he had asked me to help design his invitations and the maps showing how to get from the church to the restaurant where we were holding the rehearsal dinner. I used to be a professional cartographer, so making a map was not a problem, particularly since […]
I’ve run across a number of local business sites which offer event calendars of some sort, and many of these companies may not be aware that they can and should add hCalendar Microformat to their pages to further optimize them for both search and user experience. I’ve previously recommended hCard Microformat for optimizing local business […]
One of the top issues in delivering up local search results in a map-based format is what to do with businesses which have no street address. During the SMX Local & Mobile conference back in October, Dick Larkin asked Google Earth VP Michael Jones a question about this very thing: "What should we recommend to […]
The introduction of satellite images into map search interfaces has excited both virtual sightseers and local app developers. Further innovations like Google’s Street View have caused consternation from privacy advocates while further pumping up the buzz about online mapping. In 2008, we can expect further innovations that stretch the envelope while dynamic map interfaces solidify […]
Many local companies depend upon their information’s presence in various directories in order to advertise themselves, and the basic instrument of these marketing efforts is the Business Profile. The majority of businesses out there pay little attention to these beyond wanting their name, address, and phone numbers to be correct. However, there are far more […]
Here at the end of 2007, it’s painfully obvious that the local search advertising market remains highly fragmented. Numerous local search experts attending the recent SMX Local & Mobile Conference reiterated the observation that businesses seeking to target local audiences have a plethora of options, and identifying and selecting the right locally-focused sites can be […]
So, I got this Google-branded lip balm from the Google Store. I couldn’t resist it—it just seemed like such a kooky thing for them to brand. After getting it, I feel like Google might be approaching some sort of critical mass, and that they could be in danger of losing control of their trademark. Is […]
“Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, is the biggest shopping day of the year for U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers. But, for each Monday after Black Friday, consumer searches spike up on the internet and online retail websites enjoy their highest traffic and associated sales of the year. Search engine use is directly impacting businesses during this […]
Web 2.0 sites have caught on because they offer slick user interfaces, with cool AJAX effects and lots of user-friendly controls and really useful mashups of content. But many Web 2.0 developers are apparently clueless when it comes to search engine optimization—often to the point where they’re actively harming their presence in search engines. For […]
Last year in a blog post on tips for local SEO, I recommended using the hCard microformat as a component of local search engine optimization. I believe I was first to recommend this, and I was happy to hear a few different speakers at the SMX Local & Mobile Conference a couple of weeks ago […]
Local marketing industry savants have long been predicting the demise of print Yellow Pages books, going the way of the buggy whip due to overwhelming competition from Internet alternatives. Further, the aggressive invasion of search engines into the local space during the past few years has inspired some analysts to wonder if Internet Yellow Pages […]
Google recently opted-in many of their clients’ PPC ads to appear in Google Mobile search results. Yahoo has been offering a small suite of mobile ads for a while now, too, so I thought it’d be interesting to compare their current mobile ad offerings. This article is part of Local Search Week here at Search […]
Many companies have brick-and-mortar locations spread out across the country or around the world, and most have some type of store locator utility on their websites. Restaurant chains, hotels, retailers, service providers, and more will frequently have a substantial web presence coupled with the desire to make it easy for consumers to find their local […]
Search engines, Internet Yellow Pages and other mobile service companies are looking to aggressively deploy applications and advertising through wireless devices, and the iPhone has heated up the intensity another notch. Both Google and Yahoo claim a spike in local search queries coinciding with the iPhone’s launch, indicating that both companies continue to perceive their […]
Geolocation is bandied about quite a bit when discussing aspects of online marketing with location-specific components, but many are blurry as to how it works and how it’s being used, so I thought it’d be helpful to outline the basics of it, and to highlight some of the recent developments brought via the expansion of […]
Google’s recent deployment of Universal Search resulted in the inclusion of content drawn in from their other search verticals into the main web search results. As this integration trend continues, and as Google further expands upon the 200+ signals they use for ranking, it becomes increasingly important to diversify a site’s presence on the web, […]
Both Coca-Cola and Pepsico have seen fit to set up redirects on their homepage URLs—a very common practice among commercial websites. Classically, search optimization experts have advised clients that if their sites perform redirects on pages, they should use only server-side redirection, and it should ideally be a 301 redirect in order to ensure that […]
In the earlier installment of this article I covered the topic of local-oriented subdomaining. In this second installment, I’m covering domaining. As you may recall, I described "domaining" as the practice of buying domains mainly for their potential keyword value. Speculators purchase keyword domains with a view towards reselling those properties at a considerable markup, […]
Last year, I called for a common standard for submitting links to search engines, along with others, and the top search engines amazingly put their ongoing competition on a back burner long enough to agree to all support a common format for the public good: Sitemaps. I’m now calling for another common format that would […]
As earlier reported this year, Google launched a premier edition of Google Apps which included email service, calendars, SSO services, instant messaging, spreadsheets, and more. One interesting detail of their recent promotions of Apps is how they’re pushing this out to schools, in both free and paid “premier” service options. This is particularly interesting in […]
The practices of domaining and subdomaining have steadily grown into increasingly hot topics in the local search marketing space for the past few years. “Domaining” is the practice of buying domains mainly for their potential keyword value. Speculators purchase keyword domains with a view towards selling those properties at considerable markup, and/or using those domains […]
In January, Google announced a contest in which US and Canadian students were invited to generate their college campuses in 3D, using Google Sketchup. A few individuals or teams whose works are judged to be the best will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View for a special workshop with 3D modelling experts in […]