This poses a challenge for businesses who want to enhance their Internet presence on a local basis. If you’re a pizzeria, for example, you want anyone in your city searching for pizza to find you first.

Though many customers may still find you via the phone book, the times are rapidly changing. Google reports 34,000 searches are conducted per second. Fortunately, the ever-expanding digital universe gives you plenty of ways to make customers aware of your location. Here are a few of the best ways to get found locally:

1. Start with your website.

Consider your website to be the foundation of your search engine optimization efforts. Make sure that key strategic parts of the site are optimized for local search. You’ll want to add your address to every page, and be sure to include city names in the navigation. The pizzeria above might opt for “Milwaukee Pizza” in its title bar, for example.

You can also do some keyword research to determine if there are particular searches being done in your local area, and then begin using those key phrases in your content.

2. Register with local search engines.

You can register all your contact information with local search engines—for free. Google looks for what are called “citations,” or mentions of your address and phone number. Local citations are like links and can help increase your visibility in Google Maps/local search.

Include as much information as possible in each local profile. The more you input, the easier it is for them to provide a match when people are searching.

For starters, register with:

• Google Places
• Yelp
• Yahoo Local
• Bing

3. Don’t overlook local Yellow Pages and online Yellow Page listings.

The local yellow pages aren’t only found in paper format. They’re also online and include a variety of technology enhancements to help you get found. Yellow Pages sites like Superpages are heavily-trafficked sites and can help build citations and links for search engines. Beware of companies asking you to pay. We have rarely found these paid listings leading to any measurable results.

4. Get out and meet your neighbors with social media.

Social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are great sources of word-of-mouth marketing. Simply by creating and maintaining a presence in several of these sites, you’ll make it extremely easy for people to find your business and tell their friends about it.

When you create your site, be sure to include plenty of local information in your profile so people know exactly where to find you. Social media sites are also great places to post pictures and videos of customers. Making your customers “slightly famous” often encourages them to spread the word about your business to their friends and families.

5. Encourage your customers to submit ratings and reviews.

Between 60% and 82% of Internet reviews are positive. Are you getting your fair share? Encourage your customers to post reviews of your business on sites like Google Local, Yelp, Insider Pages, Citysearch and so forth. Do a Google search right now to see if there are already some reviews of your business out there!

6. Use online advertising.

Though most of the options listed here are free, you can also use Google’s Pay-Per-Click or Facebook ads to target specific local customers. These ads only reach the geographic area you specify and can tie-in with your website or social media sites. Use them interactively to build your audience and drive awareness.

7. Don’t forget tactics.

No matter what digital avenue you pursue, be sure to use tactics that drive interest and get you found locally.

• Always include your name and address anyplace you post information.
• Use photos and videos of customer experiences in social media.
• Share useful and usable information for your customers.
• Network online locally. Reach out on LinkedIn and to the local bloggers and social media users and interact with them

There are a myriad of options available to help your neighbors find you online. With a solid strategy and a persistent, ongoing effort, you’ll find a way to make it easy for customers to find your business.

• Predictive Typing: As you type, a prediction is made of what you are seeking.
• Instant Results: As you type, the results appear. Every new character updates the search results instantly.

The end result that Google promises is 10% faster searches. Google states the average search takes 25 seconds — 9 to enter in the query, less than one for Google to process and display the results, and 15 seconds for the user to decide and select a link. So shaving off 2.5 seconds is considerably faster. Is it true? Try it out yourself and watch a live presentation of Google Instant in action.

Technically speaking, the predictive type and “instant results” aren’t new technologies. Bing and Yahoo both rolled out predictive type solutions to their search input field several months ago. Apple has had an instant results in its search results drop-down box, which it dubs “live search”. In other words, as you type, it produces “live” search results.

What is new, however, is the combination and scale of these technologies. Google has applied these technologies — predictive and live results — to the world’s information. In other words, you can scan billions of potential results instantly while you type. Rather than typing the full search term, hitting return, and waiting (however briefly), you now get results “instantly” updated as each new character is typed.

5 Ways How Google Instant Changes the Game for Search Marketers

There are several critical implications that need to be considered by search marketers.

1. Brevity is the soul of wit: Search engine users now have a reason to reduce their attention time even further — instant results as you type. Keep your copy brief, to the point, and able to grab their attention. If a searcher can’t scan and find what they are seeking, they are only one keystroke away from an entire new search results page of options.
2. Impression counts may increase: If results, both organic and sponsored, are updated and presented as the user types, what is considered an impression? Is an impression the milliseconds between typing words, or is it a pause greater than 1 second in typing, or is it a movement of the mouse? Google provides some guidance on this: 1) the person types a query into the search box and either presses the Enter key or clicks on the “Search” button (just like it has been historically); 2) the person starts to type their query, sees a results page displayed and clicks anywhere on that page (i.e. it registers an impression when the user selects a link from that page); and 3) the person stops typing and the results are displayed for three seconds or more, implying the searcher is scanning the results page. Regardless, we advise all search marketers to monitor their AdWords accounts closely in the next few weeks.
3. Your competition list just got longer: No longer is your competition the other websites that rank for your target or niche keyphrase term, like “tankless water heater“. Rather, it is also the shorter phrases, like “tankless” and “tankless water” that now also appear as the user types in their full search phrase. Each phrase presents a new layer of competition for you to now consider. In other words, your success with “long tail keywords” is now being challenged by the shorter tail keywords that precede it.
4. Predictive search = keyword research: Don’t know if you should focus your campaign on “steakhouse” vs. “steak houses” vs. “steak house”? Look to predictive search. The term that appears first is probably the most common search result, and the one you should consider targeting.
5. Real-time is the new fast: Web users will soon expect all websites to be as responsive as Google. In other words, a 2 second load time is probably 1.5 seconds too long. Your search strategy should include considerations for ongoing load-time and performance tests to ensure the page consistently loads in a snap.

What do you think of the new Google Instant results? How are you changing your search strategy to respond to this significant change?

David Felfoldi is the chief experience officer and founder of Sherpa! Web Studios, a search-friendly web design and development firm based in Atlanta, Georgia. His goal is to make the Web a better experience, including for people who write emails in all capital letters.

First up, Veronica “Niki” Fielding, CEO, Digital Brand Expressions speaking on “SEO—Now More than Ever, a B2B Marketer’s Best Friend.” She actually talked about a whole boatload of stuff, but here are some key takeaways pertaining mostly to content:

Take heart marketers, if copy works for human beings, it will work for search engines. Write for people.

Also think about starting to incorporating multimedia, as all other things being equal, Google will rank your site higher because it wants to serve up more than text-based content.

More and more, it’s about refreshed content so you need to keep your website current. Again, all things being equal, meaning compared to a competing site that is just as optimized, continually refreshed content will train search engines to come to site more often.

Another tip: Every key word should have its own page of content on site that supports that keyword. Rule of thumb: For ever 250 words of copy, your keyword should appear five times,  written in a way that makes sense to a person. Search engine practices are always evolving but their goal always will be to create an ideal experience for person doing the search.

Blogs: Is it better to be host them internally on your website or externally, on a separate website? Answer: When it’s separate, it will be another site that will show up in the search rankings. However, if you don’t have a great way to continually refresh the other content on your site, then your blog should sit on your website.

Next, Larry Davis, VP of Marketing, PTS Data Center Solutions, spoke.

SEO has helped to increase sales; website search is the No. 3 lead source (20% of leads). The No. 1 source is from our sales folks. DBE also has been instrumental helping to improve experience for user once they get to the site. Hot point: The ongoing battle of visual appeal vs. content. Who wins? The answer: It depends on your audience.

For example, PTS customers are essentially engineers, CIOs, VPs of IT, etc.  They want content; information and education. The PTS website has over 300 pages of content, each optimized to a key word.  Does it work? If you search on “data center consulting” PTS comes up first over much bigger companies.

Trend worth watching:  Content syndication. This is content from partners that is syndicated on privately labeled web pages.

Caveats: Real SEO takes time to take effect. It’s an investment. Think months, not weeks, to start seeing a return. Black and white hat techniques may provide instant gratification but might not serve you long term.

Also, most SEO organizations don’t optimize their own sites because they don’t want their competitors to go to school on them. Check out their client’s sites instead. Similarly, if you do a good job, your competitors will steal or “scrape” your content, sometimes wholesale. To deter them, you can provide an abstract and make people log in to get the whole article. However, be sure to leave enough content outside the wall for the search engines to play with.

The image above is a word cloud. When I looked the word cloud for our b2b marketing blog, I thought it reflected our subject matter and the intent of our posts. We focus strictly on B2B. We specialize in the development of B2B content marketing assets as a primary way to convey and support key messages and establish thought leadership in a client’s given niche. We help B2B clients effectively use social media, search engine optimization, and email marketing to promote these content marketing assets, and generate and nurture leads until they are sales ready.
Okay. Given what we focus on, we’re doing pretty well, I said. Some of the related key words really stand out in the word cloud–like B2B, content, and marketing. Some of the content vehicles have visual prominence, like blogs, email, newsletters, site, and article. And the word “lead” pops out a bit.
But there were some words that were far less prominent or even absent, like optimize, search, SEO, social, and thought leadership. I was a bit puzzled by that. Those are things I thought we were definitely talking about and focusing on. When I went back to recent posts, I found that in some cases we cover these issues in posts, but we don’t actually end up using the words as prevalently as I thought. In other cases, it had been a while since we posted about certain issues and topics. Finally, I found that all of our posts and articles tend to run together in my mind; while I’ve written several articles recently on blogging and thought leadership, the ones discussing thought leadership were articles published elsewhere, not on our blog.
This has implications for both visitors and search engines. For visitors, we may be talking about and around the issues, but unless we’re clearly using the words that resonate with visitors, they might not connect the dots (issues, implications, concepts) in the same way we do. The key words we use give readers context within which to evaluate or consider the subject matter. Make sure you’re using familiar words that give your readers context of the issues. These words serve as touchpoints and help position your content.
Secondly, it’s smart to do an audit of your blog posts. What is the subject-matter allocation of your blog content, and how recent are the posts in each category? Don’t just look at the category or tag of the posts, but remember to look at the copy of each post. Doing an audit will also help you sort out what you published on your blog and what content was published elsewhere.
Finally, while there are many factors that influence how well a blog post is optimized for search, the copy you use in the post an important factor. Make sure your posts are sufficiently keyword rich. This doesn’t mean you should be keyword spamming. However, you should make sure you’re actually sufficiently using the keywords for which you want to be found.
As a test, I created word clouds for a couple of blogs I follow. Some were spot on, totally aligned with my impressions of the blog’s focus. Other word clouds left me guessing as to the intent and the content of the blog. If you simply showed me the word cloud, I could not have told you with certainty what the blog was about.
I know the word cloud is a far stretch from a complete analysis of a blog or its content. It’s simply a fun tool. But it gives you some insights into how others might view your content and your focus. Just one note: If you try to generate a word cloud from a blog feed that shows only the introductions to posts, you’ll obviously get different results than if you point it at a full feed.
So what about your blog? What does your word cloud look like? Is it aligned with what you think you’re talking about?
If you’re curious, you can go to Wordle to find out. Let me know what you think. Did your word cloud align with your mental image of your blog?

Bob’s quote really struck a chord with me because it’s a simple reality that many organizations are either overlooking or ignoring today. People are starting to view the Google search bar as their URL entry box. Instead of typing “www.zappos.com” people are simply typing the world “Zappos” into a search form. An excellent piece on ReadWriteWeb provides further insight into this rising habit.
What this means for companies is that their homepages should no longer be considered the most highly trafficked resource for people looking for their product. Consumers are becoming savvier, and an unfortunate consequence (for brands) is that people are more likely to trust third party resources vs. the brand themselves.
Because consumers are no longer spending as much time on the tightly controlled environment that brands build themselves, companies, more than ever, need to be fully aware of the search results that are sharing space with them and hopefully taking steps to make those neighbors ones that raise the value of their real estate.

Is Google the Big Winner Here?
Does the above situation translate into a need for all of a brand’s paid listings to pop up when users search for them? To Google’s dismay…not necessarily. A brands biggest concern should not be that their competitors sites are popping up in paid listings next to theirs, their biggest concern should be the negative pages that show up in the results organically. Those are the listings that are much less in Google’s control and more in the hands of consumers/brands.
Shopping for groceries is a great example of the above. You go down the canned food isle. You see that there are diced tomatoes being sold by Dole and Del Monte. They are both about the same price, size, and are located on the same shelf. If you don’t have a preference, you’ll end up just randomly picking one. Next time, you’ll pick the other. Now let’s say the situation is slightly different. You walk through the same isle and on the way to the tomatoes you see a small sign on a now empty shelf that says “Del Monte canned peas have been recalled due to a case of E-Coli.” The peas probably have nothing to do with the tomatoes you want to buy, but odds are when you get to the tomato shelf, your decision on which tomatoes to buy is no longer a 50/50 split.
But my tomatoes don’t have E-Coli!
There are great brands with great products. So much time, money, and resources are put into creating those products and then getting those products into the hands of consumers. That effort should not diminish when the product changes hands.
Just because there are people who are writing about your product on Yelp and GetSatisfaction, doesn’t mean you have to sit back and watch your search results get contaminated. No one is barred from producing content on the web. A brand has just as much right to talk about their great qualities and respond to those who disagree.
It may not be possible for a small team to compete with the entire voice of the internet, but it can definitely help. People want to engage with the brands they use. If an irritated customer posts a review on a site it may get a handful of comments, but if a representative of a brand posts something, it will be dramatically more populated. Those subsequent comments may not all be positive, but they all lead to an initial thread in which a brand got to voice its honest thoughts and show that it took an interest. A thread which in many situations will show up higher on a search results page than a very negative post that has just a few responses.
Reacting to others isn’t the lone remedy either. Creating great content around your product in pivotal to your organic search success. A big part of Google’s secret formula for organic search is traffic. If you build it (something great), they will come. The better something is, the more traffic it gets, the closer it will rest to your ideal search results.
So a microsite isn’t enough?
The key takeaway here is that when planning out budgets for consumer facing entities, the microsite simply cannot take the full budget anymore. The microsite certainly serves a purpose (as does investing in SEO to bring it higher up), but the majority of brand/consumer interactions are taking place in the domain of the consumer’s choosing. Subsequently the brand has no other choice but to focus a larger chunk of its efforts to optimize the content being created by their consumers and their critics.

According to the New York Times, a reporter for Income Securities Advisors in Miami found the article on The Sun-Sentinel, and then posted it to Bloomberg news, inciting a false bankruptcy report. From the NYTimes:

Richard Lehmann, the founder of Income Securities, said the company’s reporter discovered the article during a routine search on Google for information about bankruptcy filings in 2008. A link to the old Chicago Tribune article appeared as the first search item, bearing a current date, not its original date, Mr. Lehmann said. When the reporter clicked on the link, it navigated to the United Airlines article on the front page of the Sun-Sentinel Web site, next to a radar map showing the location of Hurricane Ike, Mr. Lehmann said.

The Tribune Company, which distributes news to papers including the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, denied any liability:

“A Chicago Tribune story written in December 2002 regarding the United Airlines bankruptcy filing that year was apparently picked up by an investment advisory and research firm and republished as though it was current,” said a Tribune Company statement released Monday.
“The story was located in the archive section of the website of the Sun Sentinel in South Florida. The story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002.”

The Sun-Sentinel’s Deputy Managing Editor-Interactive was then consulted:

Joseph Schwerdt, deputy managing editor-interactive for the Sun-Sentinel, said internal tracking records show that no one had opened the original story file since 2003. The story would have been available via a search on the site, but no one outside the paper should have had access to the story file, Schwerdt said.

Trading was stopped at 11:08am and resumed at 12:30pm.
So who is at fault? It sounds like one of two things happened:

• Scenario A: The Tribune Company, or perhaps the Sun-Sentinel, has bad search engine optimization practices, posting today’s date on old articles. This would be completely unacceptable for a publisher of such size.
• Scenario B: The searcher did not realize that the default for Google News results is relevance, and not date. The searcher did not read through the article carefully, nor noted the quotes attributed to 2002. The searcher then reposted the article as current. This would be also be completely unacceptable.

As the article has been pulled from the archives, and it is highly unlikely that anyone took a screen shot, the truth might never be known.

Direct Link to File

Show length 23:15

00:34 What is Twitter good for? Yes, it even has CLI.

02:45 The end of the Tipping Point?

03:37 Jeff on Blowing out your server (Part Deux)

05:54 Joe from SalesRoundup asks is Google Docs good for SEO

08:18 HD-DVD takes a kick to the groin, iPod fanboy talk, and you didn’t hear about J Hymn from us.

14:55 Who are the connectors, and why do you need them?

16:35 It’s all about Connections, Quality and Time

17:25 Red Saber tactics with Google Blog Search

18:19 OoVoo turns the marketing chat Brady Bunch, using CamTwist. Chris is at NewBCamp on the 23rd, Matthew Ebel will also be playing

The MoC theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters from the Podsafe Music Network

Direct Link to File

Show length 23:28

00:52 Christopher Penn is alive, political lists, websites and content management systems

03:34 Superbowl Observations, Miller Ad rocks, a bad year for ads

07:09 Sports Slogan Squatting, 19-0 Perfect Season Jinx, More on Sports Marketing

09:05 Meatball Sundae contest winners

09:27 Bending the blog arrow of time, Google Sandbox?

11:12 Killer Wordpress plugins: aLinks, Popularity Contest and Search Meter by Alex King, Google Sitemap tool

13:55 What are Google Sitemaps?

16:10 my oovoo day event, come talk to us, bring any questions or just chat, best day is Monday at noon. First 5 to sign and tell me get a free coffee card

18:48 Chris’ Super Tuesday Video gets picked up by CNN, the sleeping giants of media awaken, blatant plug for The M Show, and yes – podcasting is back!

The MoC theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters from the Podsafe Music Network

Marketing has been changing as quickly as technology has, so it makes sense that SEO (42%) and personalization (36%) came in at the number 2 and 3 spots. Pulling up in fourth place is green marketing at 32%.
When asked what was the most important demographic to target, marketing executives said the baby boomers (88%), closely followed by Gen Xers and Hispanics.
And congrats to our own MP blogger, Seth Godin, for being selected number one on the most important marketing guru list.
Here’s the news release:
So what is this telling us? Are we pulling back to our comfort zone to focus more on basic marketing strategies? What is your company doing next year? What do you think?