There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over Twitter’s local search implications. Over the past few months several Twitter services have launched with a local angle. I thought it would be interesting to get them all in one place and provide some details: Launched by the Praized Media guys, TwitArea is an add-on to Firefox that allows you to add a shortened URL link to a business’ Praized profile in a Tweet, so presumably when you are eager…
This just in; Yelp has removed the internal nofollow tags from their site. If you had read my posts, Yelp SEO Analysis Part I and Yelp SEO Analysis Part II, you might recall that internal nofollows were a big part of their SEO strategy, most likely encouraged by SEOMoz, their SEO consultants, who were big proponents of the tactic as a way to stop the flow of PageRank to undesirable pages. Earlier this year Matt Cutts of Google publicly implied…
according to TechCrunch. The update now allows for writing reviews from the Iphone so get ready for a lot of “I am writing this while drunk!” type stuff. I use the current Yelp App once in a while but I find that it becomes frustrating pretty quickly once you try to use the map to find stuff. The new app is no better. This is likely a limitation of the available iPhone map tools more than anything else though.
Recently we hired a great bay area child photographer to do some shots of our children. While I loved the photos, I was even more impressed with the follow up email I just received from the photographer. Check out this excerpt: I was wondering if you would be able to write some reviews for me on websites where my business is listed. If it is easier you can use the same content too. It is really helpful for clients to…
When I started at InsiderPages, Yelp didn’t exist, but there was this service called AngiesList that we were obsessed with. AngiesList was a pioneer in figuring out how to get contractor reviews and ratings out of people. Back in the day, InsiderPages made a splash by giving out $5 Starbucks cards for five business reviews. One of our then-rivals, Judysbook, came out with a promotion to give away iPods for 100 reviews. Then Yahoo Local came out with giving away…
I downloaded Yellowpages.com’s iPhone App this weekend and was psyched to give it a test run after hearing Frank Jules speak about it at Kelsey DMS last week. The executive summary: not bad but needs work. It does its main function of allowing you to search for businesses fine. And this may almost be enough – While driving with my wife I asked her to find the number for the local pizza place. She immediately went to Google and it…
Some notes from Peter Krasilovsky’s interview with Sonia McFarland, head of business development of Yelp. Not much new here but a couple of interesting data points. Yelp’s demo is older than you think In order to be an advertiser on the site you need to “qualify” by having a minimum number of reviews and minimum star rating While Yelp distributes its content to other local search sites, they don’t get a lot of traffic from these deals. Most of their…
The AimClear blog has a great overview of the top location-based iphone apps.
My bud Ahmed has put together a list of the top IYPs in the US based on reach derived from Google’s stats. Nothing too surprising except that Citysearch is #1. I also think there are a number of sites missing from the list – 50states for example. But still good info for all you local search obsessed freaks out there.
Miriam Ellis just put together a fantastic post on all of the sites that Google Maps is using as sources for review information for the hospitality industry. Here’s the list: 10best.com Aol.com ChefMoz.org Citysearch.com Dine.com DiningGuide.com Dinnerbroker.com Frommers.com Gayot.com Giatamedia.com Greenopia.com Insiderpages.com Menupages.com Mytravelguide.com Priceline.com RestaurantRow.com Travelocity.com Travelpost.com Tripadvisor.com Virtualtourist.com Yahoo.com Yelp.com Zagat.com I recommend checking out Miriam’s post for some great insight into how to use this list to your advantage. My $0.02 as your Local SEO Guide is…