Search Engine Guide is putting together a series on how to promote your business locally, by Stacy Williams. This overview gives a good understanding on the market in general, links to the major players, where they receive their data, and other resources.
I’ll keep this post updated as new columns come in, or you can follow along from one of the links above.
This should be a compelling series. In August, I blogged about the local search session given at the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference. I can tell you first hand that the panel of Stacy (series author), Patricia, Justin, and Greg was fantastic and well-recommended. At some point during everyone’s presentation, I would look around the audience and see wide-eyes and head-nodding, thinking “Yeah, I get that”.
Column 2 of 5 - 11/28/2006
Add a geography footer to every page. It seems very simple, and it is, but it serves a few different purposes.
Column 3 of 5 – 11/29/2006
Overview on creating an accurate business profile that can be sent to local search engines, Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), and other local business portals.
Column 4 of 5 – 11/30/2006
This is a column I’ve been waiting for. 
Global and local-only search engines allow you to populate your business data for free. These local listings are often ones where consumers are further along in the buying cycle. This is a great avenue that many local businesses simply aren’t aware of (please, do not skip the suggestions in columns 1-3 before you do this).
Column 5 of 5 – 12/01/2006
Add and edit local business information with different business aggregators. IYPs and search engines depend on this data to provide accurate results when showing your business.
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