I’ve been seeing alot of hype lately about how local searches are the ‘next big thing’. This is nothing new folks.  I’ve been telling clients, friends, and colleagues to prepare for this for more than a couple of years by including location information on their sites and making sure they register for both a Google Local listing and a Yahoo Local listing.

Printed Yellow Pages are a thing of the past.  I throw mine directly into recycling.  There are statistics that show that nearly 75% of U.S. households use the Internet as a resource when shopping locally.  Google has been incorporating its Google Local results at the TOP of locality searches for almost 2 years.  That is, search for something like ‘internet in Fair Oaks, CA’ and you might find me.

So if local customers are one of your core target markets, it makes sense to address this geographical area in your web site’s optimization efforts.  It may seem common sense, but you’d be surprised about how many businesses with clearly defined local markets ignore this and don’t even include location information in their basic web page copy.

A search engine can only index your website according to the information your web pages provide. In order to encourage the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to categorize your business within your locality, you must include specific local information on your web pages, such as your address and phone number, so that it is clear to the search engines which area your business serves.

There is a new branch of the Web growing like a well organized storm cloud. This recent trend on the Web can be used to strengthen your presence with major search engines and reach an active audience that is highly interested in your content. Welcome to the world of “tagging.”

What is Tagging?

Tagging is the process of labeling a piece data with metadata.

Using Tagging to Advertise

One of the most effective sites currently using tags is technorati.

If you have a blog, Technorati should become one of your favorite search engines on the World Live Web. Many Technorati Tags are beginning to dominate the Web by having constantly updated, fresh blog content on highly focused subjects. The beauty of Technorati is that blog application such as blogware and others are completely integrated with it allowing blog categories to be instantly tagged and syndicated into the blog search engine. Any blog can be manually added as well to technorati’s very open tagging system. Even if you only happen to get a trickle of traffic from technorati itself many times the link value alone will sky rocket the speed in which your site rank in the search engines.

There are many other tagging sites that can help you with “tag syndication.” With its encouragement to get users to submit their own RSS feeds as content, My Web 2.0 from Yahoo is a great way to increase traffic and links. Web applications like TagCloud integrates RSS and tagging while wikipedia.org is method of allowing social webpage and content development. Tagging is another way to give the power to reshape and categorize the Web to the people.

Watch for new venues for tagging to pop up and new ways to use the concept.

Well, I finally joined the Google Advertising Professionals program. I’ve been juggling a lot of customer accounts and keeping track of all their details seperately was killing me! The Google Advertising Professionals program offers My Client Center which lets me manage everyone’s accounts (minus their billing information) from one place. I hope this is a great time saver for me!

If my clients exceed $1000 in ad purchases, I will be qualified to take an exam to become a “Qualified” Google Advertising Professional. We will see if it goes that way.

I am not new to the ‘certification’ game– I had to get several certifications from Microsoft for past-life careers in technical support. I am also fully aware that passing a test isn’t the end-all-be-all way of determining whether someone is qualified to actually perform a job function or task. My techie friends and I talk about ‘paper MSCEs’ all the time. Basically, there is nothing better than real-life experience to make someone qualified as an expert in a field.

I find it interesting that Google ties the qualification to money spent (by my clients). On one hand, I can see that you really cannot gain *experience* if you’re not using the program and to use the program, well, you have to Pay for clicks. On the other hand, I work really hard at STRETCHING my clients’ budgets! Most my clients are small businesses or individual entrepreneurs. I want to make the most of their money and get the best ROI, so I’m not spending hand over fist on the most expensive keywords. I even try to find ways to get them FREE credits so they can try the program without putting up cash first. I don’t want to feel like I need to overspend my client’s money, so for that I may end up be given the opportunity to ‘qualify’ to take the test. Again, we will see and, of course, I will post the results here.

What is Folksonomy?

Folksonomy is a combination of the words folks and taxonomy meaning “people classification management.” This allows users some level of control over how the web is organized using “tags”. Tagging is the process of labeling a piece data with metadata.

Using Folksonomy as Subtle Marketing

One of the major players currently using folksonomy is Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web application that is growing very fast in popularity. With a free account, del.icio.us users can submit and access all of their bookmarks from any computer with Internet access. By submitting and tagging your own web pages, you instantly give access to thousands of other users with interests in the same tags. Encouraging site visitors to submit your selected webpages to their own del.icio.us bookmark page is a very good way to get more exposure to del.icio.us users. Submitting to del.icio.us is instant and it creates meaningful relevant links important to the major search engines.

I expect Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites to reshape how the web is categorized. And the coolest thing- right now its free. Check it out.

My husband pointed this site out to me.

http://www.googlefight.com

Mostly just for fun, let two search terms duke it out to find out which one rules Google results. Of course, you could use this for serious reasons- checking out the amount of competition for two keywords You’re considering for you site and your search engine optimization. Googlefight losers can be winners for your business…