Local Internet Marketing

If you are a local store does online marketing even make any sense?

The big three all have local search now. And it appears a Local Search War is on.

Google's approach to local search involves using yellow page and business directory information from third party providers, and integrating it with information about individual businesses from Google's main web page index. Though the service is still in beta, Google has promoted it from its relatively obscure location in Google Labs to its own Local Search URL.

Yahoo's local search is featured prominently on their standard front page with an easily found tab-link just above the keyword text-box.

I saw a post in the Webmaster World forums saying the MSN local search is becoming a major source of traffic.

The best way to ensure that your site is well represented in these results, assuming your site serves a local need, is to add the address of your business or service on the botom of each page of your website.

WHY RSS FEEDS IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE CONTENT STRATEGY

Research has always been a particular interest of mine. It's fascinating to see how what goes on in the mind affects people's decisions and behavior.

The Ponemon Institute, a research institute dedicated to privacy management practices in business and government, delved into how online marketers can build and capitalize on trust through their communication with consumers.

Now there's an idea - build trust and credibility based on permission. Perhaps they've been reading Seth's books.

Consumers remain wary of sharing vital information such as credit card numbers with merchants they don't trust, says the study. With indentity theft on the rise, I'll just bet they're wary.

Here are some of the numbers from the survey:

• 84 percent of consumers stated that they want control over the types and frequency of Internet ads sent from a specific merchant.
• 64 percent of consumers would trust a marketer more if they had control over the types of online communication that were sent to them.

If you have not started to offer RSS feeds from your site, your newsletter and your blogs - this should convince you that it is indeed the content delivery method of the future.

OPTIMIZING YOUR PRESS RELEASES CAN RAISE SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY

Most companies know that their best prospective customers are online searching for information. Reaching these hot prospects is the trick.

You have to have to increase your search engine visibility to get more business off the Internet.

A sales funnel has a large number of prospects in the early stages, but as the funnel narrows at the bottom their searches get more and more specific.

Why is it that when statistics show so clearly that Web users prefer natural search results to paid ones that companies still pour their marketing dollars into paid search marketing?

Now that the news engines have become the number one choice for news, optimized press releases can reach searchers online and they can boost your search engine results.

Instead of investing all their budget in paid ads, companies would be wise to investigate an optimized press release campaign