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For many local businesses, Google Maps has been a source of irritation and frustration. While they depend on their Local Business Listing to convey the correct data about their operation to potential customers, it can be difficult to ensure accurate information.

This becomes doubly frustrating when they see their competitors getting away will all kinds of shady tricks, such as using false business names, creating multiple listings and listing their enterprises in places where they are not located. Spammers are a clever and persistent bunch and found ways to circumvent the checks Google set up to prevent these kinds of problems.

Now, Google Maps has published official Business Listing Quality Guidelines. They are accompanied by the threat of “being permanently removed from Google Maps” as a possible consequence for non-compliance. The guidelines also include a link for reporting abuse and another for filing a reinclusion request if your listing is tossed out.

In addition, they state, “Google may respond negatively to other practices not listed here. If you have any question about whether or not a tactic is deceptive, we recommend you stand on the side of caution.”

Check out the new Local Business Listing guidelines for particulars.

Fellow Blizzard SEO, Carrie Hill, and I are back in the office after a whirlwind week at the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Conference in San Jose California. Organizers estimated that about 6,000 Internet marketers attended this flagship gathering in the heart of the Silicon Valley.

Plenty of Search Engine staffers were on hand from MSN, Yahoo and Google, both as speakers and attendees. The infamous Google Dance was Glow in the Dark themed this year and had us rubbing elbows at the GooglePlex until way after dark.

The big themes at this year’s conference were:

Landing Page Optimization from Tim Ash and Post Click Marketing, which Carrie spoke about on a panel with Scott Brinker of Ion and the inventor of Google Optimizer, Tom Leung packed them in. These critical concepts focus on what happens after a visitor lands on your website. Do they immediately leave? Which other pages do they view and how long do they spend on them? Do they buy something from your website or call you? Tracking and tuning visitor behavior and continually testing pages and click paths can bring a big lift in conversions on a website. If you’re not doing this yet, it’s definitely time to get on board.

The Long Tail of Search Marketing, how to get more and better customers with less money and effort, was another recurring theme at the conference. It was discussed in sessions about everything from keyword research to on page optimization to pay per click advertising to shopping carts to Local Search. If you’re not taking advantage of this powerful concept, you’re probably paying more than your competitors do for the same number of sales.

Social Media Marketing was the third hot topic of the week. While many hands-on sessions talked about the how-tos of making the most of social sites, the main takeaway was that Social Media marketing is no longer a cutting edge concept. It’s now a mainstream tactic that everyone should be using in the best way possible for their particular business.

We’ll delve deeper into some of these topics, so stay tuned for more.

It’s estimated that 30 to 40 percent of all searches are made with local intent. However, for certain types of businesses, search almost always has local intent. If you have such a business, it is critical to be found for as many pertinent local searches as possible.

If where you are is important to what you do, then you must maximize your business’s presence in the Local Search results and optimize it for the best performance. People searching for you may be across town or a continent away. Wherever they are and wherever you are, you want them to find you.

After years of languishing, the Local Search ecosystem has recently become a bustling, buzzing place, as an assortment of players jostle for a stake in what is a critical online space for most brick and mortar businesses.

Here are some of the reasons why Local Search is so important:

• Local businesses of all types are realizing that they need a visible online presence in order to compete in their marketplace.
• The Local Search platforms of major Search Engines have become very robust, with useful features that attract an ever-increasing number of searchers to them.
• The users of print yellow pages are rapidly moving to Internet Yellow Pages and to other locally-focused websites for information that they used to look for in printed phone books.
• The Search Engines know that Local Search is different from traditional search and that when people search with local intent, they want and expect to see different results.
• The Search Engines are committed to integrating Local Search results into the regular Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
• The Search Engines and the mobile network service providers (like T-Mobile, Verizon, etc.) agree that Local Search results are the logical results to show to searchers using mobile devices, such as cell phones and PDAs. In other words, they believe that searches made on mobile devices are most often made with local intent.
• The Internet Yellow Pages marketers realize that their clientele needs to get online. They are trying to make it quick and easy for them to do so by providing bundled online marketing options that are easy to understand, take minimal management and can be paid for on a monthly basis.
• The number and importance of Social/Local websites is growing and they are becoming more popular among users because the user generated content they contain is what shoppers crave.

This convergence of sellers and buyers primed Local Search for its current explosion. Now, searchers, businesses, Search Engines, Internet Yellow Pages, Local and Social/Local sites and Search Engine Marketers all have a huge interest in making it work.

Local Search is currently a much less competitive universe than traditional online search. However, this will change as more and more small business owners realize the importance of Local Search and become actively involved in it.

It’s critical to learn how Local Search works now. It will enable you to gain the best possible presence for your business AND position you to keep up with changes and developments as they occur. With Local Search, as with most other business and internet endeavors, the early adopters disproportionately reap the rewards.

This is an excerpt from the Blizzard eBook, Local Search Engine Marketing by Mary Bowling. 

When you eat sleep and breathe SEO every day, it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world doesn’t share your interest and passion. So today, I’m getting back to the very basics of Search Engine Optimization. Hopefully, this will allow readers to see the big picture of SEO more clearly, without it being cluttered up with all the little details that can confuse the picture. In other words, let’s look at the forest and forget the trees for a while.

What is Search Engine Optimization?
I’ll begin with a simple definition of SEO from Legal Internet Marketing “Creating and improving a website so that it will rank high in the search engines and help potential customers or clients find the website.”

I like this definition because it acknowledges the fact that the reason you want your site to rank well in the Search Engines is because that will bring you more traffic than if it is buried in the results pages. Ranking well is all about getting targeted human traffic to your web pages.

Here’s another one from Search Engine Writing “A form of online marketing, search engine optimization (or search engine marketing) is the process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.”

This definition makes me happy because it talks about relevancy, a key issue in SEO - relevancy to searchers, as well as to the Search Engines.

Relevancy Rules
The Search Engines want to return the most relevant results for every search query made. It really is that simple.

Relevant results are exactly what searchers want and what they judge a Search Engine by. They don’t always get it right, but the Search Engine with the best results is the one that more people will use more often. Therefore, relevancy is the basis for the success and profitability of the Search Engines.

Successful SEO
Successful SEO is providing relevancy and communicating it effectively to the Search Engines and to the humans who search the internet using them. Removing obstacles from this process is a critical function of optimization, but we’ll talk about that in another article.

Black Hat SEO is when you try to gain “unearned” relevancy. These tactics usually involve deception of some kind and while they can be very effective in the short term, they typically have little or no staying power. In fact, they can actually harm your website and your online business by eliciting a penalty or banishment in the Search Engines.

How Do We Demonstrate Relevance?

By what we TELL the SE’s and human searchers that our pages are about. We do this by using page titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords. Some of these tactics are more effective in some Search Engines than they are in others. I prefer concentrating my efforts on Google, but many site owners enjoy great success optimizing for MSN and Yahoo.

By what the SE’s and human searchers SEE on our web pages when they read them. Original content clearly focused on one topic conveys relevance in the best possible way, especially when it supports the title and description we have given the page. For Search Engine purposes, think about content as the text on the page. While Google recently announced that they are making inroads into indexing flash files, I wouldn’t count on this just yet.

By what others SAY about our web pages with the links they point at them.
This includes the number of links to pages from trusted websites and what the words in the links say the page they point to is about. For example, a link that says click here or more info doesn’t tell the Search Engines or the humans reading it very much. However, if the link says Downtown Denver Hotel, both the SE’s and the humans reading it believe that clicking on the link will take them to a page about a downtown Denver hotel.

By the quality of our landing pages. The more searchers who click through to a page from the search results, the more relevant the Search Engine determines the result to be. If searchers go to a page from the results and then immediately click away from it, the less relevant the Search Engines believe the page is for that query.  Google also has tools, originally developed through their advertising programs, that tell them  what the topic of a page  is.

To Rank, Be Relevant
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, it really is. The basics of SEO are to be original, be popular and most importantly, to be relevant. If you do these 3 things, you’ll be well on your way to ranking well in the Search Engines.

To many people, Search Engine optimization, also known as SEO, seems like voodoo. In reality, Google does an excellent job of telling us what they consider to be a good website that deserves high rankings.

While putting all of the pieces together in the optimum way is both a complex science and an instinctual art, if you get the basics right, you’re well on your way to creating a relevant source of information that Google will reward.

Matt Cutts, Google’s well-known anti-spam czar, recently told USA Today what those basics are. Cutts gives 5 easy to understand tips:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.
2. Fill in your “tags”.
3. Get other websites to “link” back to you.
4. Create a blog and post often.
5. Register for free tools.
6. Don’t overdo it.

To read the details of these recommendations from Google, see the full article and video interview, Google’s Cutts: Good Directions Drive Traffic to Your Website.

Our air travel system is badly flawed and it’s having a significant negative impact on the hospitality industry.

In a recent survey by the Travel Industry Association, Americans said they avoided more than 41 million plane trips over the past year because of dissatisfaction with the airlines. While our frustration with the air travel process cost the airlines more than $9,000,000,000 in revenue in the past 12 months, it also cost the hotel industry two thirds of that amount, a whopping $6,000,000,000 (yes, that’s 6 billion dollars!) and the restaurant industry lost about $3,000,000,000.

28% of the survey respondents said they avoided taking at least one plane trip over the past year-29 million leisure trips and 12 million business trips.  This translates into 112,000 trips not taken each day, mostly due to delayed and cancelled flights and security screening inefficiencies.

While we believe that air travel is safe and convenient, about half of us also think the airlines are disrespectful of our time, that the problems with air travel are getting worse and that they are unlikely to improve in the near future.

In response to this information, TIA is asking major political candidates to address the issue and hosting a travel leader emergency summit in Washington DC next month.

comScore’s latest data on online video is out and, as usual, Google rules as the home to 38%, or 4,358,306,000, of the 11,476,886,000 videos viewed in March 2008.

Despite the slick offerings on networks like Fox Interactive and Disney Online, more people watch more videos on YouTube (a Google site) than anywhere else on the net. 84.8 million people watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube in March. That’s over 50 videos per viewer on YouTube in just one month!

Some video stats you should be aware of: over 73% of the people on the net-139,576,000- in the US viewed video over the web and the average person watched a little over 7 ½ minutes of video per day. This a 13% increase over February 2008.

What does this tell us? People are watching a boatload of videos online and the number of viewers and the number of videos each person watches is growing at an astounding rate.

What does this mean? If you aren’t using web video to grab attention for your business, you are in grave danger of being left behind.

How can you get into video? For inspiration, go to YouTube, search for terms related to your business and see what other people are doing. See which ones are viewed and commented on frequently. Watch and learn. It really is that easy.