LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Jonah Stein forwarded me this missive from Josh Vickers, founder of TaskSquid, who seems to be in cahoots with Adam Harris of Calacles.com. Apparently Google has misplaced La Jolla:

It is Official. The Jewel of San Diego, La Jolla, once nestled on a prime stretch of Pacific, has taken root in a new exciting? location. [...]

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Executive Summary: Who knows?
But here’s a data point of one:
The Main Street Meat N Fish Market recently opened in Pleasanton.  My wife asked me to find their hours so I went to Google and queried “pleasanton meat n fish market“.  At the top of the SERP was this result from Patch.com (congrats to them!) but [...]

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Methinks Greg Sterling has been spending too much time with SEO types as of late because his latest post on how Facebook’s Like Buttons could put Facebook on a collision course with the big players in local search sounds like a paranoid screed that I might have penned.  In other words, I dig what he [...]

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Gib Olander offers some handy tips for SMBs to make sure their social media presence is in sync with everything else they are doing:
Research shows that many consumers that view an online business listing then visit a brick and mortar location. By linking the real-time conversations taking place about your location with your local search [...]

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Not sure if GOOG is manually deindexing Google Place Pages or if this is just the algorithm at work - often new pages rank well and then disappear for a few days - but some of the Place Pages I referenced in yesterday’s post on Google Place Pages SEO are now gone:

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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome announced today on TechCrunch that the City has released more than 100 structured data sets for developers to use via DataSF.org.  According to the article:

The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format. For example, there [...]

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Was having a conversation with my sister about funny business names (we had exhausted all other civil topics) and it reminded me of this inspirational tale.
For those interested in more family-oriented fare, might I recommend the Hallmark Visitors Center?

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So Facebook and Twitter are getting all of the attention for providing APIs that let developers recreate their services on their own sites.  This strategy has in part led to Twitter’s growth explosion.  So giving away your data seems to work - and neither of these sites has a killer revenue model.
So why wouldn’t the [...]

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Google Maps is on the verge of creating an international incident.  I did the following search on Google:
“pizza 94566″
I got the 10 pack.  Check out the URL for “New York Pizza”

If I had wanted a “Damn Tasty!” za from Amstelveen I would have asked for one Google.
I highly recommend checking out the site.  I personally [...]

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Ahmed Farooq of IBegin pinged me yesterday to let me know that he has joined the growing list of companies that are trying to become a one stop shop for updating your business listing and making sure the listing is updated across the Web.  As someone who has spent countless hours updating some of my [...]

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Zvents just pinged me that they have raised $24 million in funding from Nokia Growth Partners, AT&T and NAVTEQ.   Zvents is an aggregator of local events information and they syndicate their data out to publishers such as newspapers like the Denver Post and portals like MSN’s City Guides.
So why should you care?
When it comes to [...]

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There’s a minor commotion going on in the comments section of my popular post on how to update your yellow pages listings for free.   One of my readers has been talking to Localeze about their service to bulk update businesses with thousands of locations across a large number of local search sites, and wondering [...]

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Integration of video and pictures in search results is the most interesting thing about local search.  It’s going to take a lot of education to get SMBs to do video.  A lot of SMBs don’t understand what it means to give their data to a search engine.  I have heard a lot of restaurants complain [...]

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Last week my post about zip code SEO generated some minor controversy so I thought this week I would continue with obscure local search engine optimization tactics by talking about optimizing for phone number search.
While I am not going to argue that phone number searches will generate a huge amount of traffic for you, it’s [...]

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While at the Kelsey Local Search Conference last week I was talking to some folks from the local search group of one of the major search engines and they asked me if I knew any good sources of local content to add to their service.  They were already familiar with a lot of the sites [...]

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