© Danard Vincente


Tactics for improving your rating in local search abound. But you can study the webpages in your locality with the highest Google rank to see what they're doing all you want and, at the end of the day, you're still in Google - a huge search database where you're page is never much more than a pin prick of light in a dark night.

Ultimately, optimizing for local search in the US and Canada means targeting your attention on more focused search engines like Canada 411. Such smaller search engines may not get the traffic that Google does, but they get better results - more click throughs for your website.

Local search is the future of ecommerce in many ways. The web used to be about finding answers to grand questions. Now it is also about finding a good corned beef sandwich at a deli near your house.

Get your business ranked in local search engines. It's one of the keys to success.

© Danard Vincente


Search engine marketing software is experiencing a cycle of real growth at the moment, with a huge number of products now out there for customers to choose from. How do you find the right one?

One anonymous blogger recently said this about making a decision:

In order to understand this diversity in the real context of the marketer's needs, we ought to mention the essential factors that keep search engine marketing functional in the first place: web page ranking, advertising, keyword optimization, traffic and quality informative content.

Search engine marketing (or SEM) is the effort to make your pages (whether they're commercial in nature or not) appear higher up the list of items in a search engines results. It's also an effort to get you more traffic to your sight - click through from a search engine to your web page.

Does it work? Someone seems to think so. In the US it's a $14 billion industry...

Have you seen the television ad about the kid that lost her puppy?

Advertising today is often so creative and clever that everyone remembers the commercial, but no one remembers what was being promoted by the commercial. I can't remember what this TV commercial was trying to sell. But I remember the little girl and the lost puppy.

Here's the scene: A very sad little girl is putting up cheap flyers of her lost puppy around town. A college student is touched by her plight and takes a picture of the flyer. The next thing you know the picture of the flyer is making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter. Someone finds the puppy and they take it to the girls house while she's still out putting up her flyers. And when she gets home they're sitting there waiting for her, with her puppy. Hugs and tears of joy for everyone...

What stands out to me it the way the commercial illustrates how the digital world has become integrated with the physical world. Maybe they were advertising the phone that took the picture of the flyer. Maybe they were advertising color flyer printing. Maybe they were just advertising random acts of kindness.

Social media is becoming more and more integrated into life...

Yahoo Farechase - Cheap travel search engine The Search Engine Weblog

Yahoo! Recently launched its web-based travel search engine called FareChase. This search engine is designed to help you locate the best airfares and hotel rates on the Internet. I tried searching for a flight from San Francisco California to Miami Florida and it definitely saved me a lot of time and money by providing comparative options from different airlines. The cheapest I got costs USD246 per person from american airlines. A [...] Read More


SEO: What The 'Near' Future Look Like The Search Engine Weblog

In 1997, Google is nowhere to be found. The domineering search engine then was Yahoo and Altavista came close behind. As I retrospect, the web was not as congested as it is today. As such, fine-tuned metas were enough to get improved search engine rankings. Eventually, the web became more cutthroat and webmasters found ways to manipulate the metas to form part of top search engine results. That was the time [...] Read More


10 Reasons Why Search Engine Marketing Job Is HOT! The Search Engine Weblog

Are you unemployed or underemployed? Why not consider a search engine marketing job? Search engine marketing service is one of the most in-demand professions these days. Why? Here are the top ten reasons: 1. The search engine industry is on fire. In fact, the bubble is growing bigger and stronger each day that a lot of enthusiasts are now lured to make their own. Major search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN [...] Read More


Sponsored post: Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo® Web 2.0

Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo® is the premier event for search engine marketing and optimization. It is the leading global conference & expo series that keeps you informed about search engine advertising, including optimization and marketing issues. A number of upcoming events will teach you everything you need to know from the top experts in the field, along with information from representatives of the search engines themselves: SES Travel Edition [...] Read More


Uptake.com - a comprehensive and intuitive travel search engine Wandalust

Uptake.com, the travel search engine formerly known as Kango, is working towards more comprehensive and intuitive search results for travellers. Uptake believe that there is a demand among travellers for a single site where they can access user generated reviews and content gathered from a multitude of online sources. Uptake doesn't just aim to collate all this information it's crucial that this information is organised and searchable in an intuitive [...] Read More

No to Google's Chinese name Guge The Search Engine Weblog

No to google's Chinese name "guge" is the cry of a group of chinese fans of google. They created a site called noguge.com which is aimed as collecting suggestions on alternative names. Personally, the first time I heard about the name "guge" was about a few weeks ago. My first impression about this is that it sounds like a 2 year old struggling to pronounce the word "google" and ending up [...] Read More


HP preloads Baidu for Chinese Market The Search Engine Weblog

The number 1 chinese search engine Baidu has struck a deal with HP to pre-load its search engine to all HP machines for China starting Oct 2006. Good for Baidu, bad for Google. Google however had a similar deal with Dell. So where's yahoo and msn? They shouldn't discount China in their plans as China is the main battle ground in Asia due to the sheer number of people in [...] Read More


Google's Recent PageRank Penalties The Search Engine Weblog

You might be wondering why the sudden drop in PR for a lot of the websites out there. This drop is the most serious PageRank Penalty I've seen so far. The sites that are mainly affected are the ones that are selling links. Matt Cutts has been vocal about their opinion about paid links and thus now, it seems that they've finally updated their algorithms and put penalties on such [...] Read More


Where Chinese History Comes Alive Hidden Travel Gems

Those of you whoa re frequent readers of this blog know that I am a (big) fan of Time's China Blog. Perhaps I am living vicariously through the blog's writers, who have the enviable task of, well, hanging out in China and writing about it. (I know there is more to it than that. I'm sure there are ulcer inducing deadlines and censorship to deal with.) The latest place profiled [...] Read More


New Chinese Technology Blogs Launched Creative Weblogging

Here at Creative Weblogging you will find a global network of blogs. There are sites written in English, and also in German, French, even a bit of Spanish now and then. You will also find sites in a language spoken by over 1 billion people -- Chinese. So, allow me to introduce two new Chinese technology blogs launched so far this year: GeekerVision is a technology image and video blog. Geeker is [...] Read More