LOC@L SEO GUIDE

I was just perusing Rafat Ali’s Reinventing Yahoo post where he recommends that Yahoo should buy TripAdvisor as the first step in a strategy to redefine itself as the “people-powered listings business”. He then goes on to suggest Yelp, HomeAway, OpenTable, Trulia (home of ex-Yahoo Local GM Paul Levine btw) and Zillow as other potential [...]

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Update: Matt Mcgee informs me that this is way old news.  Still interesting though. First CityGrid and now Yahoo!?  What’s Yelp up to? A reader from a daily deals site just asked me why Yelp was linking to Yahoo on the bottom right of this URL with the words “New York Burgers” in the anchor [...]

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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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UPDATE 6/16/10: OK, maybe I was a bit off on this one see http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/16/aol-to-sell-bebo-for-around-10-million/ Yahoo finally closed Geocities.com in a way that proves Carol Bartz & co. really shouldn’t be focused on search – they just destroyed millions of dollars worth of PageRank in one fell swoop.

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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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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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When Best of the Web Local launched in August, I thought it was yet another wakeup call to Yellow Pages companies (both print and IYPs) that their business was under attack.  There are already thousands of IYP type sites out there, but when an established domain like BOTW.org launches one and combines that with the [...]

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When I started at InsiderPages, Yelp didn’t exist, but there was this service called AngiesList that we were obsessed with. AngiesList was a pioneer in figuring out how to get contractor reviews and ratings out of people. Back in the day, InsiderPages made a splash by giving out $5 Starbucks cards for five business reviews.  [...]

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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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Steve “McStud” Espinosa has another very useful local search post that shows why you should be subscribing to his blog’s feed.  Here’s the gist of it: He tested how to get more calls from your Yahoo Local listing.  This technique resulted in “1.8x more calls”: Insert Keyword into Business Name Upgrade to a Yahoo Local [...]

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