LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Cari McGee pens a New Yorker-worthy piece on how Facebook can create incredible social-local experiences as seen through the lens of a woman who was downsizing and needed help moving:
But another friend of hers, (we’ll call her Mary), said, “No, you won’t. I’ll get others to help. No biggie.” And Mary rallied [...]

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While I was on vacation over the past week, the guys over at Praized Media had the audacity to both coin some new business lingo (social media is now the “need” medium) and launch a new reputation monitoring/social lead-gen tool called Needium. I haven’t used it yet but it sounds like a pretty good idea.  [...]

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Just saw this release that Chris Winfield, Dave Snyder, Brent Csutoras, Jordan Kasteler, Loren Baker, Tony Wang and Danielle Winfield along with their colleagues at their various companies have joined forces to form Blueglass, a full service Internet Marketing agency.
This may not mean much to my readers in the local search world, but [...]

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Business.com just released the results of a study on social media usage by business professionals. The big data points that stuck out for me:

The average company in this study was planning, developing or running seven(!!!!) different social media initiatives

Facebook is the social media [...]

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From the Couldn’t Resist Department:
Tara Nelson of the Examiner.com, “the insider source for everything local”, wrote an article today called “Yellow Pages v. Social Media Marketing” on the subject of shifting your budget from print yellow pages advertising to social media marketing.  Now readers of this blog know I am all about positivity and sunshine, [...]

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Just saw this on the front door of a kid’s clothing store in Rye, NY.
The number of online “friends” your business has may be a good indication of its health. The storefronts next to Sasha’s were empty. Must have been using Yahoo 360.

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Recently we hired a great bay area child photographer to do some shots of our children.  While I loved the photos, I was even more impressed with the follow up email I just received from the photographer.  Check out this excerpt:
I was wondering if you would be able to write some reviews for me on [...]

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Back in January I posted about how small businesses could use Meetup to market themselves.  Today I got a reminder in my email via my East Bay SEO Meetup about how creative marketers are using Meetup to get the word out about their businesses.  Check this out:

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It’s entitled “Let’s Talk“.
I don’t know anything about it but the graphic makes it look ginormous.
Tip o the hat to Tad Chef

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Just discovered Twellow, a new kind of online yellow pages that uses Twitter profiles to populate business listings. I haven’t spent much time poring through it but it sparked some initial thoughts:

This is an interesting strategy to aggregate business listings, particularly of those small businesses that would not show up in a standard yellow pages [...]

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My good friend Chris Bennett over at 97th floor just launched a public beta of his cool new web analytics tool, BLVD Status.  Here’s his blog post about it.
I have checked it out a little and it’s got some pretty interesting reporting, particularly for those interested in social media performance.  It’s sort of like Mint [...]

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I am heading up to Seattle this afternoon for SMX Advanced. One of the main reasons I am going is because a lot of the SEO/SEM social network is converging there. When I started this blog, these guys were the ones who helped me get it off the ground by welcoming me into the 24/7/365 [...]

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No sooner do I join the Twitter revolution then Sebastien P. comes out with this.

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Twitter’s value just went up ever so slighty - I just installed their widget on the right-hand column. After much encouragement by Brian Wallace I have decided to try and make Twitter a regular part of my routine. I have been trying to think about how Twitter could be of use to local businesses and [...]

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Tim Nash has a great post on social media image optimization. He has figured out the image sizes that produce the best results on social media sites. This makes a huge amount of sense. If you are trying to maximize your posts’ power you could do worse than follow Tim’s lead.

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