If you think your business would not benefit from having a web presence, think again. A new report by PEW/Internet describes how internet usage continues to rise in America, up almost 11% from a year ago. They also post a handy chart of internet demographics if you want to see a break down in ages and gender.

More and more people are turning to the internet as one of their main sources of information. Your business cannot afford to ignore this advertising, marketing, and networking venue any longer. Even search engines are using technology to favor web sites that have been around longer and appear to be in it for the long haul. Even if you must start small, start Now!

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.

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.