Danny Sullivan recently posted an interesting article about the rise in popularity of SEO, and some of the press it was receiving from the Los Angeles Times. Read below and let us know what you think of the coverage given by the LA Times.

What a nice surprise to see on the front page of the Los Angeles Times today a story that features how important SEO is to web sites.

It’s Web 101 for this experienced intern covers how a former magazine editor, Lois Draegin, has entered a new life of online editing after losing her job with TV Guide. She now works as an unpaid intern for women’s site wow0wow.

As part of her new job, she’s discovered that how people search — and maintaining a search friendly web site — is an essential part of the content process. From the opening of the story:

In a search for a new job in the media, she had suddenly found herself techno-challenged. She didn’t know a URL from SEO.

It wasn’t until she was teamed up with Randi Bernfeld at WOW that she understood the obsession with terms such as search engine optimization (a method to increase traffic to a website) or used Google Trends to pick story topics and write a uniform resource locater (Web address).

And further in:

Arriving before 8 one day, her immediate task was to look for story ideas and mash together information from other websites into a brief news item for the “Wow Watch” column. Finding topics was easy enough — Draegin fits WOW’s demographic and instinctively understands the interests of its savvy readers.

But she repeatedly had to check her gut instincts against that all-important tool — Google Trends — to make sure her ideas would attract readers to the website. That morning, she chose to put yet another angle on a story about the California mother of octuplets who has been omnipresent on the Web.

In the past, she hadn’t bothered to learn such skills as writing tags and URLs because she was paid to think globally about the direction of her magazine. Now she had to think globally not only about each topic but about every word she wrote in the URL, headline, subhead, tag and links in the story.

Everything had to be crafted to draw readers.

“It’s really a challenge to do all of that at once,” Draegin said.

It is definitely an exciting time in our industry, and as more people turn to the internet to find products and services, Search Marketing for local businesses is becoming more of need for businesses looking to expand their customer base, and drive revenue.

Search Engine Land has another great article by Barry Schwartz taking a look at Google’s new “Interest-Based Advertising” beta.  This looks to provide a big advantage for both consumers and advertisers. (Read below)

Google today is launching a form of behavioral targeting advertising named Interest-Based Advertising. Interest-Based Advertising allows advertisers to deliver ads based on hundreds of interest categories and previous interactions with those users. The beta is opening to select advertisers at first but will be expanded in the upcoming months.

Brad Bender, Google’s Product Manager in display offerings on Google Content Network, explained that Google is looking to make ads “more interesting” to users and more effective for advertisers. Interest-Based Advertising allows Google to do that by giving users control over their interest categories and advertisers the ability to target based on those categories and user’s previous actions.

Interest based categories are based on the type of web site a browser visits. For example, if a user visits ESPN often, Google will know that user is interested in sports. Bender told me Google currently has 30 top line categories and about 600 detailed categories. In addition, users have control over these categories and can add or remove categories in the user ad preferences section at google.com/ads/preferences.

Previous interaction is the second area of Interest Based advertising where Google is able to show ads to users based on their browsers previous interaction with that advertiser. For example, if a user had a product in their shopping cart and did not check out, the advertiser can display ads on other sites, within the Google network, that promote that product or that product line. This is Google leveraging their DoubleClick technology from the acquisition in April 2007.

To read the complete article (which I highly recommend) Click Here

I found this good read on Twitter and it’s effects on Local Marketing by Chris Smith over at Search Engine Land it is definitely worth taking the time to read.

The Twitter social networking and micro-blogging service was launched only two years ago, but it’s rocketing up in usage numbers quickly, and it seems likely to turn red-hot. Many companies are rapidly cluing into the promotional value, but smaller businesses appear slow to hop on the bandwagon. Here are a few tips on leveraging Twitter to help your locally-oriented business.

As oft pointed-out among search marketers, Twitter links do not pass “link juice”—that is, they don’t transfer PageRank value from Twitter to linked-to sites. Even though links in Twitter are nofollowed, there still could be some small value in real ranking terms, according to the theory that “citations” or “references” appear to sometimes help improve rankings in local search.  So, at the very least, it’s a good idea to claim a profile in Twitter and link back to your business site.

But, the larger value of Twitter to your company may be in terms of audience engagement and as a communication vehicle, if you learn to use Twitter effectively…

…Even better, if they endorse the business to their followers, this becomes an online species of word-of-mouth-marketing. So, how do you encourage this to happen?

Twitter is full of word of mouth Marketing opportunities. Here’s a sample of just a few tweets I saw that came up in the last week for people seeking NYC restaurants:

• “I need a good reco for a restaurant in NYC with fried chicken. Anyone have suggestions?”
• “looking for inexpensive restaurant options in NYC. Anyone want to help? I’ll be in Soho, but all around the island”
• “I’m seeking NYC Mexican restaurant recommendations, any thoughts?”
• “looking for a NYC restaurant recommendation for me and my lady friends…”

To read the complete article Click Here

Then head on over to twitter and follow eLocal Listing for updates on blog posts, products and not to mention the fact that we would love to hear what you are up to.