One study shows that in 2008 local search marketing rose by 58%, reaching a whopping 15.7 billion searches for the year. Internet yellow pages are most frequently used, along with online business directories and sites that feed through information from yellow pages (like Google Maps). More and more consumers are using these sites to find products, services, and information they are looking for at the local level.

 

An important first step to getting localized is to make sure your website is set up to naturally receive localized traffic. Lisa Barone’s article "Small Business SEO: How To Launch That Web site" offers some great advice for onsite efforts. She suggests inserting ‘trust and location cues within your content’. This can be done on your home page, in your about us page, on a press page, and also on a contact us page.

 

Claiming your listing, or submitting a new listing for your location on local search engines is key. Below is a list of some great local search sites you should have your information listed on:  

 

Local.Yahoo.com: With over 13 million site visitors per month, Yahoo Local is a great place to get your site listed. Approval for most listings is very quick, about 2-4 business days.

 

Maps.Google.com: An obvious choice, Google Maps receives almost 40 million site visitors a month. Getting an approved listing will require you to wait a few days for a post card with your verification code, unless you choose to verify your listing on the phone.

 

Other sites include:

AboutUs.org

CitySearch.com

SuperPages.com

Yelp.com

Maps.Bing.com

MerchantCircle.com

YellowBook.com

CitySquares.com

BOTW.org

GetListed.org

InsiderPages.com

 

It’s also a great idea to get listed on local BBB sites, your local chamber of commerce, or make a donation/sponsor a local charity. It’s often not free to submit your information to sites, but you might just get lucky and find some that are. Local directories are another place you might look to place your listing. Just recently Vertical Measures was listed on Local First Arizona and Best of the Web.

 

Sunday in the Arizona Republic there was an interesting article by Justin Doom regarding Twitter and its uses locally, as well as blogging for local exposure. If you haven’t hopped on the blogging or Twitter bandwagon yet this article might just make you change your mind. Real Estate agent Dru Bloomfield utilizes Twitter for her listings here in the Phoenix Metro area. She has gotten clients from the site, along with Realtor Nick Bastian. Bastian’s blog posts on the recent light rail expansion prompted one Colorado investor to contact him about potentially purchasing $2.5 million in apartment buildings near the expanded track. He also says that about 70% of his business comes from online marketing activities on Twitter and his blog. It really does work!

 

Using tools like Twilert to get notified when people in your area are looking for the product or service you offer is a great way to stay on top of conversations on Twitter, as well as building up and interacting with your followers. You can also do a simple search at http://Search.Twitter.com anytime to find out who is asking a question you can answer, or looking for a product/service you offer.

 

A few weeks ago, Steve Ballmer, CEO at Microsoft, said he was willing to "spend to compete", to the tune of 5%-10% of Microsoft’s overall operating income on search for up to five years. It’s apparent that the folks at Microsoft have figured out there is money in search. But what does this competition mean for Google?

 

The first thing that competition does in free enterprise is keep the heavy hitters honest. Not only that, it facilitates improvement and growth. When a company, service, or brand is in competition with another, each will play off the actions of the other for the benefit of their own. An improvement is made by one, causing the other to take stock and reinvent. This ebb and flow creates for, what is usually, a very productive system.

 

As competition relates to Google, up to now they’ve had only a few real contenders. Arnie wrote last year about Google and Yahoo’s head-to-head, and that as internet marketers we need Yahoo to thrive. Microsoft has, in the past few months, taken over where Yahoo tried to jump in, but the overall premise is still the same: competition for Google is essential to safeguarding the integrity of search. The difference this time around, however, is that Microsoft is more than prepared — in the form of billions of dollars, and innovative search solutions.

 

Early numbers are showing an increase in Microsoft’s overall search market share a month after Bing’s unveiling. There’s no doubt, though, that they have a lot farther to go. It may just come down to who can master real-time search, and address the issues facing current searchers today: outdated and irrelevant results. 

Don’t Take Them! 

In business as in life, you’re only as good as your reputation. That’s why it’s vitally important when you’re building links to your website that you don’t take any shortcuts that could damage your business’s reputation or affect your rankings with the search engines. What’s just as important as getting links for your site is that those links appear relevant to anyone visiting the site.

Creating organic links are important for many reasons. One of which is so spiders or bots sent out by the big search engines like Google and Yahoo will crawl your website and index your site for key terms/phrases. These bots use links to travel from one website to another.  It is also important to have links back to your website from sites that are constantly updated with new content. Sites such as Performancing.com have content from professional bloggers updated daily and the site itself has many links pointing to it. Linking on this website or others similar to it, back to your own website can potentially increase your rankings and crawling frequency.

The process of link building is so important, consequently there can be an enormous temptation to take some short cuts to try and leapfrog up the search engine rankings. It’s possible to do this, but it can backfire on you. The link building process is not just about quantity any more, it’s about links from as many high-quality, relevant sites as you can. Linking from sites with high page rank, or with relevant content are seen as good links and certainly given more importance than spammed links. Not long ago you could artificially build spammed links to your site for the purpose of SEO – but that rarely works today.

For instance, you are able to build links quickly, with spamming programs. Or, for a price, some companies will build hundreds or thousands of links back to your site. Instead of moving up in the Google and Yahoo rankings, your site could get penalized, or even de-indexed altogether.  The major search engines have become very good at spotting spammed or worthless website links.

When it comes to building links, steady & honest wins the race. The main things to remember in link building are to be ethical, create a good reason (content) for others to link to you, and try to build links for traffic. If you are looking for a quick way to build links don’t get wrapped up in the hype that some spamming companies promote. Remember, if it seems to good to be true it is!

Know any short cuts that actually work?

[tags] link building, natural links, Google, Yahoo, performancing.com, high page rank, black hat SEO, spamming [/tags]