LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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:

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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?

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

The recession, or whatever it is, could be like an earthquake for local search players. And if you’re one of them you may want to make sure you packed your brand in your earthquake survival kit.
While at Ad:Tech I overheard a provider of local business information mentioning that they are getting more inquiries than ever [...]

[Read more →]

A while ago David Mihm asked if I could provide guidance on how to optimize a business with multiple locations in the same geographic area. Well Dave, here at Local SEO Guide we aim to please, eventually:

[Read more →]

With Google’s recent introduction of 10 yellow pages-like listings in Web search results for local queries, it is going to be harder for local search sites which depend on “category in city” search queries (e.g. “Plumbing Supplies in Pleasanton, CA”) for a lot of referral traffic from Google to get that traffic. If I were [...]

[Read more →]

How many times have you found out of date information about your business on the Web? At Insider Pages we averaged several inquiries per day from disgruntled businesses because we were displaying an incorrect phone number, address or name.

[Read more →]