eLocal Listing provides small business the opportunity to gain exposure on the internet via internet marketing. They have established relationships with Google and Yahoo! Local Verticals. They recently launched their own video product which allows them to take advantage of Google and Yahoo’s Universal Search.
Check them out at http://www.eLocalListing.com or call them at 800-285-0484
What can I say? I had a blast speaking at both the Kelsey Local Video Panel and the SES Local Search Marketing Panel. Thanks to all of you and your great comments and feel free to email me at stevemcstud {at} gmailDOTocm. Also please don’t forget to fill out the rating cards SES provided all you who attended. On another note, I am requesting all people who link to my page please use the anchor text “Biggest Chicago White Sox Fan” as I would love to rank Number 1 for that. Again thanks for all the nice comments I truly do appreciate them.
A representative from Microsoft announced that starting today all the Search Engines have agreed to let webmasters start cross-linking sitemaps. What does that mean? This means that you can now link to sitemaps that are hosted on a separate domain. The one clause is that the domain name that the sitemap is referring to must be on the same domain as your robot.txt I will post more about this later but as Danny Sullivan pointed out the bloggers here get to blog about it first and therefor probably rank first for this update.
All in all this session was good except for the absence of Google from the panel as both Yahoo! and Live had representatives including my friend Brian Gil over at Yahoo! Local. There were a number of suggestions from Chris Smith an others that included:
There were two things that struck me during this panel, the first was that Yahoo! said that only in certain industries do reviews come into a factor for the ranking of the listing. Yahoo! also mentioned that being closer to the center of the city only comes into effect when a user is signed in their Yahoo! Local ID and has supplied there address AND is applied only to certain categories. One could assume this would be applied to restaurants and not Plumbers. The other thing was Gab Goldenburg was claiming that he was receiving seo juice from a domain he said he simply forwarded and did not apply the 301 redirect, that I think is very questionable on how big if any influence that would give.
I just finished sitting in on the Video Blended Search Panel on which again was moderated by Vanessa Fox and done very well I might say. The one thing that I noticed was a lot of misinformation, thats the nice way to say it, so in actually, some of the panelist were just flat wrong on some statements as I do specialize in this. All in all it was a good panel though, some basic tips they gave were:
Yahoo! for the first time in public spoke out about their new Yahoo! Open Search platform. I believe this all runs user satisfaction. In Yahoo!’s words “They want to take the user from ‘to-do’ to ‘done’ more efficiently.” They seemed to focus around one Yelp Result which was “Higuma Japaneese Restaurant.”
So what does Yahoo! Open Search mean? According to them Webmasters can add the following components: Media, Task Links, Favicon, Structured Data (Review Ratings, Product Prices, Hours of Operation), etc.
Users also can mark a listing as spam. This is a great feature to help control spam from the get go and not let it get out of hand like some Google Local Results. They also allow you to determine what the “Call to Action” is on the listing, for instance, they gave an example of an ebay results page which ranked for the query “Apple iPhone”, the user will be able to hit “Bid on this item” and they will be able to bid straight from the Yahoo! Page.
This is serious giant leap forward for Yahoo! I see nothing but great things coming out of this and look forward to implementing this for my own use.
They noted to stay tuned to http://www.ysearchblog.com for further updates.
This session seamed to be more of a sales pitch type panel more than anything, but then again, what else could you expect? Vanessa Fox did a great job with the panel which contained representatives from Yahoo!, Google, and Live. Most of the questions asked were in regards to ranking and you never really got a clear answer except “optimize it like normal”, but you can’t really expect the Search Engines to really tell you their algo now can you.
The panel just really expressed the importance of blended search in cooperation with user satisfaction. All panelists stressed getting your businesses in as many vertical engines as possible.
So I arrived bright and early into a gloomy San Jose Airport this morning. Danny Sullivan presented a very good keynote on several issues pertaining to search, seo reputation, and Microhoo.
Search 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, … - He discussed the fast evolving search platforms with all the the major players. He all seamed to stress the importance of taking advantage of Verticals showing up in Search Results (i.e. Video, Local, and News). Also a hot topic was personalized search and where do we draw the line.
Reputation of SEO and Standards - He pointed out how SEO right now sort of has a black eye from all the bad PR and Rip Off SEO companies out there and explained how the industry will continue to thrive through these stereotypes. Also discussed was the necessity of Standards in the SEM World sort of like an SEM BBB.
Right now I am in the Blended Search conference and will write a post shortly after it is done.
I will be leaving tomorrow morning on a flight to Santa Clara to attend SMX West all week. I will be blogging live from the event. Also if you are attending feel free to say hi.
I have long pondered why Yahoo! has decided to separate and keep separated their Local and Maps platform which seem to fit each other perfectly as Google Maps has combined their Local Search and Maps. You would imagine that it would be easier to drive more traffic to one source than two, and in effect, easier to grab a bigger market share. Greg Sterling wrote a little piece on market share and Google seams to have a clear lead but this also may be due to Local Searches and Directions are split into two destination sites and Google Maps consists of both.
Although I imagine Yahoo! has perfectly good reasons not to do so, and I speculate it is for the following reason:
In my opinion Yahoo! Local is far ahead of Google Local technology, feature, and efficiency wise and just flat out provides better results.