So you recently went to search for your local small business site and wondered why three other similar businesses came up before yours? The answer is – they’ve been doing their homework. Meaning that they’ve taken the time to optimize their sites for local search, which can be very rewarding. If you pass on this, …
Bill Slawski over at SEO by the Sea wrote an interesting post about the Google patent application for their new “Plus Box” feature in the search results. There are several valid concerns regarding what and how much content from another site should be shown by Google to still qualify as “fair use” and how much …
Drawing partly on its relationship with Zillow, Yahoo! is launching an improved “HomeValues” section as part of Yahoo! Real Estate. It’s also integrating more community features (as Zillow and Trulia recently have) into the section: Through an expanded partnership with Zillow.com, users can access additional home details, including tax assessments, sale history and neighborhood comparable …
Trulia has it, Yelp has it, Ask.com has it (there may be others) and now Google has it: neighborhood search capability. The benefits and rationale behind this are obvious — aligning the capabilities of the engine to the way people actually think and live in the real world. It’s absolutely essential for real estate but …
Google has taken up so much “shelf space” with coverage recently it’s hard to get to much else with any depth. But there are lots of other interesting things going on. One of those things is Local Matters’ new consumer destination LocalGuides. Launched yesterday, LocalGuides combines local information with recommendations and lists around specific tasks …
John Hanke, Director Google Earth & Maps, announces the new blog: As web mapping (dare I say “the geoweb”?) matures, we’re finding that we have a lot more to communicate about new developments in Earth, Maps, Local, and our APIs. The tools are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and more interrelated — not only to …
Yahoo’s oneSearch beta, their user friendly mobile search offering which has changed the way that I search via my mobile phone, is expanding into Canada, the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany and France. Yahoo oneSearch is quite hot right now, especially in local, as the local results are served automatically based upon user location. So, if …
Today, IAC’s Citysearch becomes the first major local search consumer destination to add video on any kind of scale (note the qualifiers). In addition to video, produced by TurnHere and currently available on the New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles sites, the press release explains other changes and upgrades. The major change, outside of …
Last December Google introduced the Local Business Center and allowed businesses to provide their address, phone numbers, website, offered services, business hours, accepted payment methods, special coupons and more. After you provided all the information, is it necessary to get your information active and used by Google. The activiation is done by either Google sending …
From the Yahoo! Maps and Local Blog: Based on a lot of user input, the latest update we’ve made to the Broadband version of Yahoo! Maps is to the Driving Directions print page. The new format of the “Printable Version” allows for an interactive experience that simply put, makes them more useful and easier to …
