LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Just posted the following list of local search api’s on SearchEngineLand.  I am going to be maintaining the list here and will be updating it from time to time.
Alcatel Lucent Open API Service Tap into network data to pinpoint a user’s location via their mobile device, enable geotargeting of ads & offers and finding friends [...]

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VanillaCoke, one of my fave readers, has done the honor of putting up an interview with yours truly on my fave SEO Blog, SEOBook.

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I just sent an email out to a bunch of local seo types and saw this on the “message sent” confirmation screen:

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I just checked out Google’s new Social Search experiment.  The idea is that Google can index information from your social network and display relevant content in your search results.  For more detail read Danny Sullivan’s post on the launch.  Here’s Danny’s summary scenario on how the system could work:

Google sees I have a friend on [...]

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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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Mike Boland of BIA Kelsey is overseeing the mobile local search panel.
Danny Francis of Cellcity walks through an implementation of GoOrlando which appears to be a simple IYP put on an iPhone.  Per Danny’s comment below this was just a demo app to show what a basic local mobile search app could be.  I am [...]

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Steve Marshall of BIA Kelsey Group is going over some consumer research re local search.  Some of the key points:

16% of consumers use Social Networking Sites as a Source for Local Shopping Info
47% think ratings or testimonials from users of a product or service is very important, up from 40% two years ago
18% of those [...]

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RedBeacon, a new lead generating service for local service providers, is the winning start-up at this year’s TechCrunch50 conference.  From the pitch video I watched it seems like RedBeacon is basically ServiceMagic except that service pros don’t have to pay to quote a job - they pay a percent of their quote if they win [...]

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Twitter just announced it’s launching an API that will allow developers to add latitude & longitude to any tweet. There’s all sorts of funky services this could lead to such as a site that tracks the locations of Twitter spammers for people to drop nukes on and such (if they are dumb enough to opt [...]

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National IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) have long been amongst the biggest benefactors of organic search engine traffic.  The typical IYP has north of 15MM business listings.  Add category pages, city pages, reviews, maps, etc and you are easily looking at a 50MM+ page site with a huge amount of high value & high volume keyword [...]

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There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over Twitter’s local search implications.  Over the past few months several Twitter services have launched with a local angle.  I thought it would be interesting to get them all in one place and provide some details:

Launched by the Praized Media guys, TwitArea is an add-on to [...]

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Actually this conference was Steve Espinosa’s brainchild but he has brought in a bunch of luminaries including Greg Sterling, Atif Rafik of Yahoo Local & Steve Stukenborg of Google TV.  There will be a number of other local search rock stars including David Mihm, Will Scott, Gib Olander of Localeze, Mike Boland of the Kelsey [...]

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Any of my readers who have sites that generate a decent amount of local search traffic and are looking for ways to increase their CPMs drop me a line at localseo-at-localseoguide.com.  I might have something interesting for you.
Update: This is not intended for local business sites (e.g. a local mattress retailer), but rather for local [...]

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David Mihm’s 2nd annual survey of my esteemed colleagues in the local seo world is now up. It’s a fantastic report and probably will do as much for the economy as the Stimulus and perhaps even more than TARP.  For those of you with ADD, here’s a summary of the top 20 factors on a [...]

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This post appeared yesterday on Merchant Circle as part of their “Guest Blogger” series but Tad Chef insisted I put it up on my site so I could get a link from him and who am I to argue with that? So without further ado…
SEO, the art and science of ranking well in search [...]

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