Last week we covered an overview of local search and how to register with the local feature of each of the big three search engines. If you want a review on how to register see: Google, Yahoo, Bing.

Today we’ll discuss other local search directories. These directories provide a large amount of local search traffic and are growing in popularity. Each of them has different features and are attractive for various reasons. Today’s blog is simply a listing of the options available. It doesn’t hurt to get listed in all or most of these forms depending on what your business does and the value the local search provides.

1. Yelp
2. Kudzu
3. CitySearch
4. Craig’s List
5. Local.com
6. Service Magic
7. ibegin
8. insider pages
9. Judy’s book
10. infoUSA
11. MagicYellow
12. MetroBot
13. Search Site
14. Yellowpages.com
15. yp.com
16. YellowUSA.com
17. acxiom.com
18. Discoverourtown.com
19. pinpointpages.com
20. merchantcircle.com

While these sites aren’t necessarily the most heavily searched sites they are targeting local people who are performing local searches and looking to buy. So when a customer does find your business on these sites converting that person to a buying customer becomes easier. Registering at these sites expands your reach and your personal web.

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So today I review the process for registering with the last major local search search engine. Tomorrow’s blog will get back to neighborhoods. We’ll be talking about the barber shop.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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I randomly dropped into a conversation the other day with someone who had just had a “beautiful” new website built for them. They were very excited about the site and awarded a free Adwords campaign. Being diligent about their business and loving their new “pretty” web site they were excited about taking advantage of the campaign and driving traffic to the site, they have picked excellent key words targeted the correct market and built a strong strategy for driving traffic from the campaign.

unfortunately there are a few, well maybe a bit more than a few details missing. I’m dividing the following information into basic and advanced. Lets start with the basics.
Basics:
1) Make sure that you own the URL.

2) Have the web site hosted on a server that will be accessable to you directly and any other professionals that you might decide to use to replace a previous vendor.

3) Make sure you have a unique user ID and password that you do not have to share with your vendors and if you do have to share the id and password change it after the work is complete.

4) When referring to a web site you’ll often here the term “look and feel.” This means that a web site has to look pretty but also “feel” pretty. You want your web site to be easy to use. The main menu should be accessable from every page on the site.

5) The background on a web site should be flat and bright. If you have white text on a patterned dark colored background you are going to turn people away.

Advanced:
6) There are too many free easy to use content management systems out there to pay someone to build you a static site that you have no control over and can not add content to easily. A content management systems allows you the business owner to easily add or change content on existing pages or even create new pages without much effort and with minimal knowledge.

7) Understand why you are building a web site. The web has changed in the past five years. You can no longer throw up a brochure and expect to get business from it. Actually this type of web site has never really worked period. At a minimum your web site should bring the customer one step closer to making a purchase. That means you need to get the customer to giver you their contact information in a form – Don’t expect the customers to call you just because they visited your web site. They aren’t even lead until they’ve given you some type of information. You can encourage customers to give you their contact information by asking them to fill out a form for a free consult or by offering a free newsletter of some sort. You can even just say if you’d like me to contact you please provide your information here.

measure the success of your site. How long are users staying on your site? What pages do they click on most? Which pages don’t they see? Which pages do they see? Where are your customers coming to your site from? Where do they go when they leave? All these questions can be easily answered by a free program from Google called Google Analytics. There are other web stat tracking programs available as well. The fact is that you need to know this information if you want your site to drive business.

9) Just putting a web site on line does nothing for you. You will not gain any traffic especially if you haven’t created a web site that meets feature 6 above because search engines won’t like your site. Here I’m going to offer a word of caution. You don’t need SEO. It helps buy you don’t need it. As a small business the cost of SEO can be too high. But you obviously still want to drive traffic to your site. This is where paid search, see my article on Adwords, and social media make the big payoff. You can also read my article on Tweet Strategy Conversion and measurement for more detail here.

10) Make sure that whomever creates your web site also goes to the effort of submitting the web site to the search engines. You probably want to be sure they have submitted you on the local search functions as well as the general search.

Never hire someone to build your web site that can’t articulate an understanding of the principles expressed in this blog.

September 18th – Seth Godin just wrote an excellent blog that is well worth reading about building web sites. The questions he posses are of primary importance. You can find his article here here.

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Today I wanted to discuss a technique that almost guarantees fist page search results when someone is searching for your name. This strategy is very valuable for individuals involved in sales.

Search for Kevin Metzger

To test the strategy I had to do a search for my name and as you can see I come up in 5 places on the first page of Google although none of the results go directly to my blog sites. The first result that is related to me is video results. I have some videos posted to YouTube so I come up when the user clicks on that page. The next site that shows me is a network that I maintain a profile on and sometime blog at. Then there is LinkedIn my radio show profile page and finally you see a picture of me at the very bottom of the search page. This picture and profile was created 2 minutes before I did this search. It was done on the Google Profile page and this is a very valuable tool.

If a searcher chooses to click on my profile they now have access to both my blog’s, my twitter profile page, my LinkedIn profile page, and my Facebook profile page. They can also see a personal bio I put together and some limited information about me. Here is a quick look at the profile page.

Kevin Metzger profile page

This page took 5 minutes to create and put me on Google’s front page with my picture in no time. If you think anyone will ever search for you and you want to be found. Then this is a simple strategy that you must follow to guarantee your spot on Google’s fist page. You can create your profile at Google Profiles. It’s as simple as filling out a form and following directions.

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How comfortable are you with the web, writing, search engine optimization, marketing, lead generation, even follow up phone calls? The question is what are your comfortable doing and what do you want others to do for you? Where will you spend your time? You may need to spend your time to learn new skills but you also only have limited time. Do you really need to know how to create a web site? Do you really need to know how to optimize your site to be recognized by search engines?

No matter what your business take the time to go research e-lance. Here is a short video about how to find good project descriptions. Using elance or another site like rent-a-coder could be the best investment of your time and money.

Original Video – More videos at TinyPic

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