LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Another triumphant #1 image ranking for the blog.  It’s the little things that count right?

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I am as tired as anyone else about the political bullshit that is going on in this country and there’s only so much that Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and So You Think You Can Lose Weight While You Dance, Cook & Remodel Kitchens can do to distract us. I am particularly cranky about all [...]

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Google announced a number of upgrades to its voice search application today.  One of them looks like it could be particularly troublesome to local search directory players.  From TechCrunch:
Another feature is the ability to call any business in Google Search. This does not have to be a company in your local contacts app — it [...]

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Just found an article on Angieslist about an outfit called Medical Justice that helped a doctor contractually obligate patients from talking about them online with a gag order. It certainly sucks to have someone talk smack about your business online, but suing a patient seems like an absolutely boneheaded way to deal with it.
Hey doc, [...]

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Today the Yellow Pages Association released a new study based on Comscore data that shows an increase in local mobile usage, particularly as it affects the use of local directories.  Here are some of the highlights:

The number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile phone increased 14 percent year-over-year to 17.3 million users in [...]

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I have often wondered aloud why there has been no competitor to Adsense in local search.
Well, it seems like the industry has been wondering the same thing. Over the past few months we have seen the launch of CityGrid and there are a variety of mobile ad networks out there that are targeting local [...]

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Ok, here is a poorly formatted liveblogging of this session:
Maile Ohye of Google sez:
Talking about ecommerce issues where we have a site with 158 products but because of filtering there are 380,000 URLs, so Google doesn’t know what to crawl.

Maintain a consistent URL structure
Directories and filenames are case sensitive.  http://apple.com/itunes/ & http://apple.com/ITUNES/ are considered to [...]

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Branko Rihtman of SEOScientist presented an interesting idea about how to test SEO:
He calls the method “Multi-directional” experiments.  Basically here’s how it works:

Benchmark where you are (e.g. rankings/traffic for a particular keyword)
Test your theory by changing from State A to State B
Wait a bit (at least until the changed pages have been crawled)
Compare results v. [...]

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Borrell is predicting that local online advertising spend will only grow by 6% in 2010.
Last year according to Borrell local Web spending grew by 46% over 2008:
The growth was due mainly to smaller local businesses being forced to adjust their marketing dials for a more efficient advertising mix,” according to Borrell. “Many of [...]

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and other great local seo tips from Dev Basu. See Page 16 for the GOOG Maps thing.

via @davidmihm

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Mike Blumenthal frets that with Google Local Business Center now becoming Google Places and adding a lot of nifty new features:
As part of Google’s rebranding of the Local Business Center to Google Places, they have created a new help area and a totally new forum area for uses of the Google Places center.

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Mr. Sterling states that 4 million businesses (2 million in the U.S.) have claimed their listing in Google Maps.  And I quote:
let’s imagine what it would look like for Google if all two million US local businesses that had claimed listings were to advertise at the highly affordable $25 per month (or $300 per year). [...]

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Great discussion on TechCrunch about the need for an open database of local business listings.  My two favorite comments thus far - the first from a former Facebook engineer and the second from Dave Hyman, CEO of MOG, my fave web music service:

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My post on the post-Chirp potential for Twitter and local search is now up on SearchEngineland.  Bottom line, Places of Interest + Promoted Tweets + Tweet Annotations = big implications for local search.  More thoughts coming later.

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Peter Krasilovsky gets up on the stage for an interview with Sam Sebastian, head of Google Local & B2B.  Peter is the Colombo of local search interviewers, and that’s a compliment.
Got distracted and have not been covering this one closely so jumping in late:

Peter asking about Google Place Pages
Sam: “No evil plan for Place Pages [...]

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