If you are finding visits lagging on your local business website, you might want to try some online advertising strategies that will get you a lot of exposure, fast.

One way to do this is with an online press release or human interest story that will get picked up in different promotional and news outlets. Using this technique, your online press release will be used on news feeds through Google News, Yahoo News, and relevant Business News sites, and possible your local newspaper’s online section also.

Some sites will charge you to publish your online press release, however if you can get your press release out in the form of a human interest story, many outlets may pick that up and run with it as another news or entertainment item without expecting payment.

To do any sort of human interest story or entertainment item with the hope of being picked up and distributed by a lot of news outlets at no cost, you have to have something newsworthy to announce or promote. (There’s always a catch, huh?)

Look within your company, from employees to customers, for personal interest stories that have been affected by your business or product.

* Is your company actively involved in a local charity or cause?

* Is there a time-sensitive story that you can use as an angle? (Reimbursing gas to any employee willing to drive around with a company billboard sticker on the car was one recent story that had a small company in national headlines because of the time-sensitive issue of gas prices.)

If you can’t find a newsworthy story to submit to local online news outlets, then opt for a straight promotional press release to pay news sites.

Now that we have ascertained that Links are an important part of your overall Local SEO strategy as it relates to actual people, lets look at how Links affect your site from the perspectives of search engines.

Links provide navigation for people visiting sites, but also for ’spiders.’ (We also use bots, crawlers and other cool creepy-crawly type names for them, but you get the idea.) Basically, a spider is a program that goes out to websites and gathers up information, then gives that data back to a search engine to index your site for their search results.

Your site is mapped, and the Spider is the map-reader. The important thing to remember is that you never, ever, ever want the map-reader to get lost!

When the spiders index your site, they use your links to get to other pages, one by one. Because we want to the spider to get to and from the sites effectively to index your site, you need to use links that are good for not only human visitors, but spiders, too.

So, what links can a spider not follow? Here are some of the basic ones:

Drop Down Menu Links: Spiders are unsophisticated and have a seriously hard time with drop-down menus.

Flash Links: Flash it dynamic and cool, but Spiders just aren’t there yet.

No Follow Links: Um, it means no-follow. Spiders won’t follow.

JavaScript Links: Javascript is wonderful, but it essentially invisible to spiders. Spiders won’t be able to index your site and your links will be worthless. (Most drop-down menus use a Javascript function.)

Now that you know the types of links there are, let’s look at what they do for search engine page rankings, and what they mean to people.

At its basic level, links are the words people click on to surf the Web. To be technical, they are called “hyperlinks,” but most people today just shorten that to “links.” Links make the web work; it is how we find other sites because without them, we would all be sitting on one page forever with no way to get to anywhere else on the web.

From a person’s perspective, links mean that when someone says their site is “listed” in, Yahoo, it means that Yahoo has a link to their site. When you like a site you recommend it by putting a link to that site from yours. When you submit your site to the big search engines like Google and Yahoo, you are requesting that they list a link to your site so that others can find it and visit.

One of the ways that Search engines determine which sites will be listed for which search terms is by considering the site’s rank. The ranking formula is determined by how popular a specific site is on the Web as a whole. That popularity is, in part, determined by how many other sites link to that site. Google has its own vernacular for link popularity; they call it “Page Rank.”

Every link to your site is like a vote for your popularity. The more votes you have, the more popular your site. And you thought High School was over, didn’t you?

Link Me! Link Me! Building links in today’s Local SEO advertising world is a little like jumping up and down waving your arms in gym class hoping the jocks will pick you for their team. (Roll your eyes all you want, but you know you wanted to be picked!)

Every site looking to expand it’s foothold in the search engine optimization world wants to build some link love with other related sites. Good links are as resource that not only bring your more visitors, they can also improve your page rankings and increase your page reputation.

Links are one of those categories that seem so straightforward and simple and yet once a business starts delving into the process, they get overwhelmed and discouraged.

To give you a better understanding of Links and how they work, let’s start from the top and work out way down.

There are four main types of links out there.

1. Text Links: This is the most common type of link. It is a word or phrase that, when clicked, brings you to another page or site. Sometimes these are called Static Links.
2. Image Links: This is an image, a picture, that when clicked on brings you to another page or site.
3. URL Links: This is just a website url that is a link
4. Dynamic Links: These are Javascript links that take you to another page or website, but they have extra codes embedded to perform other functions as well.

Think about the types of links that you have on your site, what type they are, and where they lead.

We’ll talk about the type of links that you want for your Local SEO in another post.

Local online advertising can incorporate a lot of products and advertising styles but coupons will always be a great kick-start for a new product. Marketing Vox has a post about the coupon usage online and in the Sunday newspaper to look at the coupon clipping habits of consumers.

Internet coupons are of increasing interest to consumers, with 11 percent of households now obtaining them online — an increase of 83 percent since 2005 — according to (pdf) a recent analysis by Scarborough Research, reports MarketingCharts. However, the Sunday newspaper remains the number-one place for acquiring household coupons: 53 percent of households usually get their coupons from the Sunday newspaper.

I find it interesting but not suprising that coupons offered for online advertising still trail the rest of the markets so much.

Online coupons account for only 11% of the market, in comparison to in-store coupons.

Other leading places for acquiring coupons include the mail (35 percent), in-store coupons (33 percent), preferred customer/loyalty cards (22 percent), in-store circulars (22 percent), weekday newspapers (17 percent), product packages (17 percent) and magazines (15 percent).

There is a huge online market for coupons and entire blogospheres dedicated to it, but the market is still trailing. Why? I have my suspicions.

Online marketers that offer coupons usually do so through special ‘online coupon source’ sites that require membership and a site-specific printer download to print your coupons. For the average coupon clipper in a hurry, the 5 minutes of typing and downloading required for what may be one single 20 cent off coupon just isn’t worth it.

In comparison, the ability to whip out some scissors and clip a coupon from the Sunday paper is monumentally easier.

When companies advertising their products streamline their online coupon offerings to be in line with ease of the Sunday paper, we’ll see a larger increase the online market share.

Companies should remember the ease and entitlement which consumers feel is necessary to make the leap from interesting product to purchased product.

Mobile phone users and local mobile advertising specialists alike have been intrigued by the rumors of a Google gPhone for well over year but other than rumors, nothing much happened. A few people claimed to have videos of it, but it was actually a TI phone working with Google’s Android platform.

Last week some new rumors surfaced again regarding Google’s entrance into the mobile phone fray, sparking tentative interest in technophiles everywhere.

When the rumors surfaced last year, Google instead brought out the Android operating system; Android is a platform that allows that gave mobile manufacturers the ability to allow customers to get enhanced access to Google’s search engine from their mobile phone.

This year the rumors have gained momentum from comments made at a Google event that insinuated that Google was working on it’s own mobile phone to replace the iPhone.

Google dominated the search engines and added seamless applications for mobile lifestyles, as well as changed the advertising world online with Adsense. It only makes sense that a launch of a Google mobile phone will have some serious effects, good or bad.

Google’s dominance in the online search engine world and attitudes towards online adverting will most likely send a ripple effect to local mobile advertisers who want to jump in on the gPhone marketing party.

Of course Google could make a mess of things and turn out a substandard product or an iClone with nothing much new to add.

If Google does this, and does it well, the already booming local mobile advertising market could be in for a ride.

For any online business, customer feedback and reviews of their product are essential to increasing quality and sales. Many businesses employ people full time to test products and request feedback from customers to analyze the product and see where there can be improvements, or worse case scenario, see where the flaws are.

Waiting around for customer feedback can be a lengthy process, though, and often a fickle one as many people only call customer service when they have something negative to say.

With Twitter’s purchase of Summize, a search engine that specifically crawls Twitter posts, business will (eventually) be able to get some real time feedback on their products and services.

I know that some advertising blogs are pretty ho-hum on this subject, with a few people saying that Twitter essential bought its own search engine, but I disagree with the blasé response. Let me explain why:

People talk. People Twitter. People talk and twitter about the new products and businesses that that purchase things from. People have these conversations at random, often a half sentence here and there. This is a huge difference from the type of specific posts on, say, a blog or a review site. Summize searches the twitter posts for conversational sentiments related to your specific search terms and analyzes them for positive, negative, or whatever sentiments.

Just think about it for a moment… if you could zero in on all of the casual conversations in the world that mention your product… wouldn’t that be a gold mine of insider information about your business?

David Szetela got my attention with a small blurb on PPC advertising.

Playing the PPC game without first taking the time to learn the fundamentals of advertising copywriting is like sitting down at the poker table with scant understanding of the rules, and proceeding to drop dollars into the pot while better-trained players scoop that money out.

Granted the gist of what he wrote is simple and those of us in the advertising business already know it, but I like the way he worded it. The reminder that businesses jumping into the PPC field without understanding it are throwing money away is an important factor. Yes, a correct PPC campaign can be financially rewarding, but if it is done without an understanding on of the process than you not only blow your advertising budget, you also throw away the time spent on that campaign. Time is something that no business really has, as each moment a competitor is striving to catch up to you and, chances are, they are doing it the right way. You can’t bluff your way through an Ad campaign.

Dave‘s article goes on to discuss both the art and the science of PPC advertising, saying that the science makes up to 90% of the PPC proficiency and financial efficiency.

This is an important item to remember because PPC is mostly about the analytics. Measurements, benchmarking, trends, algorithms, the correct PPC campaign uses it all to understand what your customers are searching for, how they are searching for it, and where they are buying it from..

If your company is going to spend the time and money to invest in a PPC advertising effort, make sure that you hire someone with expert knowledge in the field to avoid throwing your money away.

Some companies that hesitate to build an online marketing campaign do so because of a firm belief that if you have a quality product and service, people will find it and come to your site. While that is true in the most minimal way, the fact is that while you are relying solely on product, your competitors are relying on product and advertising.

If the best chef in the country is opening up a fabulous new restaurant in your local area, will you know it just because of the smell of wafting cuisine? Probably not. You will know about the restaurant opening because it was advertised. People saw the ads, got curious, and went to the restaurant. While there, they ordered. Luck favors those that tweak fate in their favor, plain and simple.

To make the most out of your local advertising budget, don’t be afraid to embrace both marketing and public relations. If you are opening a new local online business, you want people to know about it and show up. Just like the opening restaurant, you want to market the online business and get people to be curious, follow the links and come on in.

Whether you are marketing a local online business product, service, or facility, you need to advertise to let people know that you exist, that you are out there, and that you are ready for customers.

Don’t rely on search engines alone, look for a human factor to grow your online business.

Advertising companies have long cashed in on the voracious appetites of online gamers. Of course the ads are usually FOR the games that they are trying to sell, rather than ads for other products, but targeted to gamers.

Yahoo Games recently announced that they will expand their online gaming to include into ad-supported online game options by the end of the year.

Basically, Yahoo Games is expecting to offer ad-supported downloadable games by partnering with other online gaming partners such as Double Fusion and NeoEdge Networks. The partnership with these gaming communities will result in ads sold to display before and after the games, and occassionaly during. (During the game is not going to be all that popular, and probably result in a backlash from gamers.)

The problem that comes with this is gamers, the target audience, will be viewing a lot of these ads as interruptions and intrusions into their gaming activity. Resentment is NOT the kind of feeling that an advertiser should want to instill into customers.

Another way of looking into this (basically same) advertising ploy is to use ads as virtual gamer money. In essence, let the gamers pay for the game with their time. Ultramercial, LLC allows a gamer to pay for their game by watching an ad. Their attention to a 30 second spot pays their way to the game that they want.

This advertisement style will gain appreciation, not resentment, from the target group that the advertiser is focusing on.

Incidentally, Ultramercial, LLC is claiming a click-through rate of over 4% for sponsors’ ads. Appreciation goes a long way.

With all of the local online advertising techniques available to businesses, we expect those businesses to choose the strategy that works best for their model, their product, and their business culture.

In a frenzy of advertising budgets and end-of the-quarter-profit-margin-reports, some ad execs go off the deep end and choose the most obnoxious and hated strategies that end up costing, not making, their company money.

When it works, advertising is an integral part of a internet consumer’s web experience: As users surf their daily news, sports, entertainment and business associated sites, they encounter ads. Entire business sectors are invested in understanding how much traffic was driven to the sites advertised. They measure the traffic flow; analytics, metrics on click through rates and anonymous profiling are a part of business.

To the detriment of the advertising industry, for years studies ignored or just didn’t look for how ads affected users and therefore the traffic. How many sites lost viewers because of rude advertising techniques?

Here are some of the most rude, crude, obnoxious and customer alienating techniques used.

1. Pop-Ups
2. Pop-Unders
3. An ‘X’ close box that doesn’t close, it just sends you right to the site
4. Ads that move with your curser, forcing you to read it
5. Ads that occupy the entire page
6. Ads that blink
7. Ads that take too long to load and stall the entire page

It is entirely possible, and most likely probable, that you have alienated your customers if you have used techniques such as those above. Customers surveyed have said that they avoid sites with guerrilla advertising and view it as highly intrusive.

If your intention is to gain customers and sell a product or a service, don’t go the way of the rude, it will back fire on you.

Today is the day for Pegasus News’s launch of their iPhone App. The app will feature a host of events, restaurants, even garage sales that are all searchable by the hour and location.

What is it?

Pegasus News is a digital news source that features over 100 DFW neighborhoods and suburbs. We have the deepest local coverage of entertainment, events and news of any local media outlet in town, and all of this is customized for every individual user.

The app melds beautifully with the GPS enabled iPhone 3G to keep it’s users feeling like a vital part of their city’s life, in touch everywhere they go, the next point of interest only a click away. The phone knows where you are and the Pegasus News App can make recommendations based on your location. If it’s 7:30 in the morning you won’t have to deal with a recommendation for a bar that night…you’ll get recommendations for a great breakfast spot. I love the smell of well-timed advertising in the morning.

Pegasus is really going after local advertising opportunities. Their website shows that they are no-holds-barred for what they are willing to offer for local advertising:

• Display - Three different sizes of traditional banner ads placed on the site linking to advertisers’ site or business page on Pegasus News. The most common form of internet advertising.

• Direct Email - Weekly email message sent to users that can be sent to the entire database or custom segments.

• Mobile Edition / Text Messaging - Mobile version of the site with entertainment information and opportunity to text message users advertisements.

• Video - Video advertisements placed on the site.

• Audio / Video - Video and audio messages placed before or after Pegasus News generated content such as interviews and radio stations.

• Map Placements - Showcasing your neighborhood locations.

• Geo / Behaviorally Targeted - Target a specific group of people based on their location in the area or behavior within our site.

• Daypart / Time Sensitive - Like traditional broadcast media, you can daypart when your ads run without paying a premium daypart price.

• Contests & Promotions - Integral part of your marketing plan. We can implement and execute a customized contest or promotion just for you.

• Challenge Us! - You will never hear us say it can’t be done because we will always want to try. What can we do for you?

With the opportunity to for a local business to target the right customers at the right time, in the right location,they are looking at a great opportunity.

Until now, Local.com has been relying on third parties reviews of local businesses that turn up in its searches. Now that Local.com has launched it’s own review capability, its game on. Personally I always thought a little strange that a site that specializes in local search didn’t have its own review capability. After all, local businesses are highly review-driven, often having neither the name recognition of the big-box retailers or the advertising budget.

What Features are there? What are they offering?

The start up launch of the Local.com’s reviews offers a free basic listing to all businesses, in addition to its PPC ad product. The PPC ads are based on an auction model and are placed on SERPs depending on keyword and category.

As an added feature, they are also offering a “Local Featured Sponsor” option that guarantees your ad will be placed above the organic results. The LocalPromote product will align your add with the mapping section.

Local.com ratings and reviews section will allow users to create an account and enter ratings and reviews for any business listing that appears on the site. (Again, listing your business is free.) The site gives users the ability to enter comments and a rating, and also view past reviews that they have submitted previously.

There are some people who think that reviews are just added clutter for businesses online, but I can’t see myself firmly in that camp. Online reviews cannot and should not take the place of good product description and text, but they are a serious value add for any small business. Local.com did a smart thing by adding that capability to their well trafficked site.

Tony Dietrich posted an interesting blog about local advertising and infrastructure today called Advertising Pays for a Lot of Things… What Happens When the Ad Budget Dries Up in a Recession?

I loved the promise of the first paragraph of the article and how it set up questions, issues, solutions and possible market targets for me to think about.

Doing some research on the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, I started wondering what happened to advertising during that period.
Although I haven’t turned up any detailed studies, I took a look at the various archives of advertising that allow Internet access to their exhibits, and noted the general move to less expensive, more localized advertising, and fewer adverts for more expensive goods.

Now obviously everyone in the marketing business is feeling the results of the American Recession, heck, just about every business sector is feeling the pinch now. I thought it was great that Tony took the time to try and dig up some information about advertising during the Great Depression to try and forecast what kind of trends we are all going to be facing in the near future.

It’s a feature of the 1930s depression that countries and individuals became more and more localized in their habits and mentalities, concentrating on survival rather than expanding their horizons.

The article itself was more about what (might) happen to the infrastructure demand if a depression were to hit full on, but the sideline of local advertising is, to me, the juicy part.

As businesses begin to scale back on their advertising budgets as a whole, focusing on their local market will be wise choice. To do that though, they’re going to need the tools to do the analytics carefully enough to target the RIGHT market, at the RIGHT locations.

The ultimate prize for any local internet advertiser is a site with thousands of thousands of hit’s a day, with 90% of the incoming traffic voluntarily entering their zip code upon entry to the site. No scrapping for ISPs that can be highly unreliable to pinpoint a user’s exact location. No begging the user for a hint as to where they are located…just precise, immediate and voluntary giving of their zip code.

Internet Advertising gold, people, and it isn’t just a platinum-lined cloud in an ad-exec’s dream world, it’s real. What site is it? What is the URL of this ad-utopia?

Lean closer. We’ll whisper it.

The Weather Channel at www.weather.com. Heck, you’ve probably already gone there this morning to check the beach forecast. And did we mention that they have a healthy mobile traffic, too?

The weather channel has been overlooked by some advertising companies who mistakenly believe that only ‘weather nerds’ go there. That’s a mistake. Business people, housewives, sports fans…. The weather channel is a great common denominator across the advertising board. Everyone wants to know the weather, and the URL is the easiest thing in the world to remember. The catch is, to know your weather, you have to type in your zip code when you get there. Something that we all dutifully do.

At that point there are numerous ads from local businesses targeted to exactly that area, exactly that zip code.

Clickz.com reported on NBC’s buyout of the (previously) privately owned Weather Channel, which encompasses its TV, Online, ad Mobile businesses.

NBC Universal’s joint acquisition of The Weather Channel properties in conjunction with Bain Capital and The Blackstone Group will result in a stronger local online business for NBC. In addition to the dominant cable television network, The Weather Channel’s properties include its well-trafficked weather.com site and mobile offerings.

This is bold and intelligent move for NBC’s Local Advertising business and I expect to see it grow exponentially.