Search engines like Google are working hard to incorporate local search into results, which is good news for you. If you don’t have the time, money or need to hire a digital marketing firm that will put you on the front page of Google, and most of your business is local, you can do most of the search engine optimization (seo) work quite easily yourself, without knowing any code.

I’ve posted below an excellent video from SEOMoz that walks you through all the places you should hang your virtual hat online, to be fully optimized for search locally. If you don’t have time to watch the video, here are the key points.

1. Make sure you post good, useful content online filled with keywords someone might use to find your business
2. If you can get people to link to the content and have people share it via Facebook and Twitter, that would be helpful as well, but that takes a lot more time, something not readily available in most small businesses.

Make sure you business is listed in:

1. Local directories, including Yahoo Local, Yelp, CitySearch, Judysbook, Insider Pages and any other sites where you think potential clients might be. If you’re a restaurant, make sure you’re listed in Urban Spoon and Chowhound, and if you cater to vactioners, Trip Advisor is an important place to own a spot as well.

On the sites, make sure your address is listed correctly, along with being in the right category, and respond to any reviews on the site. Not only is it a good to keep in touch with customers who took the time to review your business, but the more reviews their are, the more potential SEO value as well.

Other elements you’ll ideally add is your business name, photos related to your business, and as much as possible, connect the pages to social sites your company has. In general, the more your business is talked about online, the more visible you become.

SEOmoz – SEO Software

Hello all, today you’re going to have to head over to By Bloggers, For Bloggers, because that’s where you’ll find my latest post. It’s all about how to guest post, so I figured I’d make the post itself a guest post!

Here’s a press release announcing some exciting new for our company!

Two Northeast Counties First In the Nation to Receive Fiber To The Home Service

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

TWO HARBORS, MN ­– Lake County, MN officials were notified Friday that the county will be among the first in the United States to offer fiber-to-the-home for every structure on the electricity grid, thanks to a $66.3 million federal stimulus grant by the Rural Utility Service, a division of the United State Department of Agriculture.

This project means for the first time, every structure in an entire county’s electricity grid will have the option of receiving fiber-optic Internet, phone and television cable service up to 100 times faster and more advanced than anything currently available, for roughly the current price. (For comparison: currently typical homes with high-speed Internet service operate at speeds of up to 512 kilobits upload speeds and 3 megabits a second download speeds. This would provide for up to 100 megabits per second, thanks to using fiber-optic cable, instead of traditional copper phone lines. The project Google is proposing that Duluth and Superior applied for would still be 10 times faster with uploads and downloads up to 1 Gigabit per second.

In addition to Lake County’s project, Cook County has also been awarded $16.1 million in federal stimulus dollars, matched by $600,000 in private dollars, to put fiber into parts of Cook County.

“We’ve long felt rural Minnesotans have been missing out on the Internet revolution, and the kinds of jobs and opportunities the Internet brings. This helps many people in the Arrowhead region not just catch up, but leap frog those in the most populated areas of Minnesota, including the Twin Cities,” said Christopher Swanson, CEO of PureDriven, a web marketing company based in Two Harbors, MN, who has been a leader in pushing for increasing use of fiber-optic access in the state. He was hired by Lake County to create the RFP that brought in National Public Broadband to write the grant application for the project. PureDriven also led the Twin Ports initiative to attract Google to Duluth and Superior. Swanson, co-owner of PureDriven, also serves on the Two Harbors City Council and last year served on Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s 2008-2009 High-Speed Broadband Task Force, focused on increasing high-speed Internet use across all of Minnesota.

“This will be looked back on as an economic leap forward into the future for northern Minnesota,” Swanson said.

Of the $66.3 million Lake County will receive, about a third will come as a grant, with the remainder as a low-interest loan. The Rural Utility Service will provide all $66.3 million in funding, as the official distributor of the government’s Broadband Improvement Program.

The $66.3 million will be matched locally by $3.5 million in revenue bonds issued by Lake County, which expects to begin seeing a profit on its investment in five years.

Lake County intends to own the infrastructure, but over the course of the next 12 months, will be hiring the company to lay the fiber in the ground and overhead on telephone poles. National Public Broadband will operate and maintain the system, which will likely be completed 18 to 24 months from now. The first homes will begin receiving the service about a year from now. Homes will be steadily added as the infrastructure is put in place.

Duluth Township is included, but not the City of Duluth. The stimulus money was for rural Internet projects only.

Townships in Eastern St. Louis included in this plan include: Duluth, Alden, Pequaywan, Ault, Fairbanks, Bassett, White and Morse

Included in those townships are: St. Louis County, including Ely, Babbitt, Hoyt Lakes, Brimson and Rollins, and many smaller populations in the areas.

Tiers of service will be offered depending on the speed and channel options, comparable to what is charged today. Installation price for the project, is to be determined.

“Approximately 37,000 people stand to benefit, as do roughly 1,000 businesses and 98 community institutions. This comes in addition, to the 510 jobs Lake County estimates this project will create upfront,” the United States Department Of Agriculture reported, in its announcement Monday.

While National Public Broadband, which will run the system, will purchase the high speeds at bulk rates. The system will be open access, meaning other companies will be welcomed to also buy access at bulk rates, and sell the service to their customers, thus allowing for expansion of the system to areas not currently part of the project.

For a listing of winners in this round of stimulus funding, including a similar but independent project in Cook County, MN, visit http://www.usda.gov/documents/ARRA_PDF_09-14-2010.pdf

For background on the program visit: http://www.usda.gov/rus/telecom/arra-broadband.htm

Cook County also has been awarded $16.1 million, matched by $600,000 in private dollars,  allowing, the Arrowhead Electric Cooperative, Inc. to add fiber in northeastern Cook County. Approximately, 11,363 people stand to benefit, as do roughly 138 businesses and 63 community institutions. In addition to the more than 87 jobs the company estimates this project will create upfront, it will provide a foundation for economic growth and job creation for decades to come.

For more information or on camera interviews: Contact Patrick Garmoe, Digital Marketing Specialist at PureDriven (218) 461-9655.

I don’t normally link to great content. I leave that for our Facebook page. But I wanted to alert all our regular PureDriven Strategies blog readers to a post that quickly and easily explains all you really need to know about search engine optimization, in one blog post. Many people I meet aren’t too keen on reading an entire book on the subject, but they’d like to know the basics, in order to make the right decisions for their own websites. Well, here’s the answer: SEO: A comprehensive guide for beginners.

Hello all,

I’m heading down to the first annual Minnesota Blogger  Conference, so I don’t have a lot of time for this week’s Productivity Friday tool. But I never want to leave you without something juicy.

So please head to: http://wiki.kenburbary.com/

There you will find a whole list of social media monitoring tools, both paid and unpaid. I doubt this is exhaustive, but it is as exhaustive a list of monitoring tools as I’ve ever seen.

Some of the links are to free sites, such as Google’s Blog Search or Twitter Search while others cost some money to use, but have great reputations, such as Radian6 and Scout Labs. Another one I’ve heard about on the list, if you’re looking for something that ties your social networks into your sales software, is Jitter Jam.

Anyhow, have a great week perusing around the options, and let me know which tool you love. In the meantime, I’ll be gathering all sorts of good advice on blogging, which I’ll be sharing with you in coming weeks.

Cheers!

Patrick

This post is for all those people out there who currently or will some day own a smart phone. (Everyone, in other words.)

I didn’t really feel like I should have to write this post, but unfortunately after lunch today, I realized it needed to be said.

And I preface all this by saying, I love Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and every other kind of online social networking site.

But don’t ask me to lunch, if you’d rather spend time in Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, or some other virtual playground, as you chow down on a burrito. My time is valuable, and I’d rather not spend it out with someone focused more on an iPhone.

It’s bad enough that people take phone calls while meeting with me. It’s obviously fine if an important client is on the line, the need is immediate, or if it’s a working lunch with co-workers. But 99 percent of the time, that isn’t the case. Accepting a Facebook friend request, checking in on Foursquare, or announcing to the world via Twitter what you’re having for lunch is not an emergency, just in case you were unclear on that.

Please respect my time as a professional by not ignoring me during lunch.

Photo by: Intersection Consulting

Often people talk about online marketing and traditional off-line marketing of products or services as being completely different, with their own strategies, objectives and tactics. But the real change here is not about digital tools compared with traditional ones. It’s about building relationships and providing great content, thus making your potential customers want to buy from you. Here’s a quick example from my Realtor. Want to learn more about what Brok Hansmeyer is doing to attract customers through relationship marketing? Then visit brokhandsmeyer.remax.com

This is a short video visually explaining how to take a video you saw on YouTube, and easily repost it on a blog, or onto your Facebook page.