LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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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This just in;  Yelp has removed the internal nofollow tags from their site.  If you had read my posts, Yelp SEO Analysis Part I and Yelp SEO Analysis Part II, you might recall that internal nofollows were a big part of their SEO strategy, most likely encouraged by SEOMoz, their SEO consultants, who were big [...]

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according to TechCrunch.  The update now allows for writing reviews from the Iphone so get ready for a lot of “I am writing this while drunk!” type stuff.  I use the current Yelp App once in a while but I find that it becomes frustrating pretty quickly once you try to use the map to [...]

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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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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.  One [...]

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I downloaded Yellowpages.com’s iPhone App this weekend and was psyched to give it a test run after hearing Frank Jules speak about it at Kelsey DMS last week.  The executive summary: not bad but needs work.
It does its main function of allowing you to search for businesses fine.  And this may almost be enough - [...]

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Some notes from Peter Krasilovsky’s interview with Sonia McFarland, head of business development of Yelp.  Not much new here but a couple of interesting data points.
- Yelp’s demo is older than you think
- In order to be an advertiser on the site you need to “qualify” by having a minimum number of reviews and minimum [...]

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The AimClear blog has a great overview of the top location-based iphone apps.

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My bud Ahmed has put together a list of the top IYPs in the US based on reach derived from Google’s stats.  Nothing too surprising except that Citysearch is #1.  I also think there are a number of sites missing from the list - 50states for example.  But still good info for all you local [...]

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Miriam Ellis just put together a fantastic post on all of the sites that Google Maps is using as sources for review information for the hospitality industry. Here’s the list:
10best.com
Aol.com
ChefMoz.org
Citysearch.com
Dine.com
DiningGuide.com
Dinnerbroker.com
Frommers.com
Gayot.com
Giatamedia.com
Greenopia.com
Holidaycheck.com
Holidaycheck.de
Holidaycheck.es
Holidaycheck.fr
Holidaycheck.it
Holidaycheck.nl
Holidaycheck.pl
Holidaycheck.ru
Hotelchatter.com
HotelGuide.com
Hotelguide.net
Insiderpages.com
Menupages.com
Mytravelguide.com
Priceline.com
RestaurantRow.com
Travelocity.com
Travelpost.com
Tripadvisor.com
Virtualtourist.com
Yahoo.com
Yelp.com
Zagat.com
I recommend checking out Miriam’s post for some great insight into how to use this list to your advantage.
My $0.02 as your Local SEO Guide is [...]

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Here’s Part II from last week’s SEO analysis of Yelp. Sorry it took so long.
In this week’s episode we are going to analyze the following pages on Yelp:
1. Category Landing Page
2. Category Search Results Page
3. Member Profile Page

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A few months ago I noticed that Yelp, one of the media darlings of local search, had hired Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz to update their SEO strategy. As a former Yelp competitor I had spent a fair amount of time studying their local SEO tactics and I thought it might be helpful for my readers [...]

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Here’s part II of what I’ll be talking about at SMX Local in a few minutes.
So you’re a business and you have a local website or websites you like (or don’t like but have been successful at not dealing with that issue). Your business info is listed all over the Web. You’re on a lot [...]

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