LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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Nothing to do with SEO or Local here. Just some great tunes by two of my favorite artists.  Everything That Happens Will Happen Today by David Byrne & Brian Eno.

I’ll be walking the Expo floor on Tuesday if anyone wants to connect.  And I’ll be at the Internet Marketer’s Charity Party Monday night if anyone wants to get a better idea of how to optimize local search and their alchohol intake.

Congratulations to reader Shimon, aka “The Shimonerator”, our Local SEO Quiz winner #2. Shimon operates a Jewish wedding guide site.  Shalom Simon!  (try saying that ten times fast)

If so I suggest you check out one of our Local SEO Quiz winner’s sites which is all about Gatlinburg, TN.  Not too sure what happens in Gatlinburg, but it looks like it’s a good place for renting cabins in Tennessee.  Thanks to reader Shane for playing along at home.

We have a winner for the quiz on how Centro screwed up the purchase of Real Cities by not talking to a SEO professional first.  Actually we have multiple winners.

Shane identified that Centro neglected to redirect a large number of subpages from RealCities.com

Shimon noted that Centro is doing a funky chain redirect - a 301 from http://realcities.com to http://www.centro.net/realcities then a 302(!) to http://www.centro.net/realcities/

While the damage is likely not permanent, and it may be that the RealCities pages had very little SEO value to start (although I doubt that’s the case), this is classic case of how SEO should be a part of any M&A deal.  An uninformed buyer could lose a huge amount of value overnight by making these kind of easy to avoid mistakes.

Shane and Simon please ping me with your link requests.  And Centro please ping me if you want help fixing your problem

Can you tell how Centro screwed up its purchase of RealCities from McClatchy?  A clean link with the anchor text of your choice (within reason) to the first reader who figures it out.

Tip to Greg Sterling as always for alerting to me to this news.  Have a great vacation Greg.

Justin Smith, a Colorado SEO Consultant, thought it might be a good use of bandwidth to interview me re local search.  If you’re into listening to me pretend like I know what I am talking about here’s the podcast.  Notice how Justin has transcribed it (a good SEO tactic).

Just stumbled upon the reincarnation of Judysbook.  For you youngsters in the local search space, JB, along with Insiderpages and Yelp, was one of the original social-local-search poster children.  I believe they even trademarked that term at one point.  Whomever is running the show over there has smoked the local search crack pipe and decided that there’s gold in them thar neighborhoods.  Judysbook had previously abandoned local business search in favor of creating a social network around coupons and deals, which now can be found at Couponlooker.  I am guessing that this is merely a SEO play by the investors to use their old reviews to gin up some traffic and flip it but I could be totally mistaken.

I am assuming Andy Sack, JB’s founder, is no longer involved as his blog has a recent post entitled Don’t Start A Company In The Local Online Space.

Just when you were thinking that the world needed one more online yellow pages with customer reviews, Best of the Web beat you to the punch and launched BOTW Local.

So what makes this different from all of the other local search guys out there?  On its face, not much.  However, in SEO circles BOTW is considered a tier 1 Web directory, which means that when your SEO guy is starting a linkbuilding campaign, there’s a good chance he starts with getting your site listed in BOTW.   This means BOTW has relationships with thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of sites or their marketing representatives.  And if they are already getting them to part with $ for a link from the main directory it seems like a slam dunk to get them to shell out for a local directory link.

And now that BOTW has millions of local listings, I would expect to see their SEO traffic start to crank up eating into every other local search site’s audience.

And any $ spent on BOTW Local will be that much less spent on another IYP.

Man this local search thing is getting crazy.

The WSJ writes today about the emergence on online video advertising for small businesses.  According to the article some advertisers are seeing great performance.  This bodes well for the growing legion of SMB video ad sellers.  Here are a few that you might want to check out:

AdReel

Jivox

JiffySpots

Mixpo

SpotMixer

TurnHere

One of the things that caught my eye in the article was how the “try it for free” incentive was key to attracting the business profiled in the piece, Mirek Boruta of Princess Port Bed and Breakfast in Half Moon Bay, CA.  As more companies get into this game there will be a proliferation of these “try it for free” offers and while it may not be worth chasing all of them down, smart marketers will take advantage of these promotions as much as possible.

More on this article from my main man, Greg Sterling.

On a more somber note, let us all remember Mr. Isaac Hayes.  If you have never heard him do Light My Fire from his Live at the Sahara Tahoe album you have not truly experienced hot buttered soul.