In This Issue:
1. Leaving Winter Behind
2. In the News
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A
5. Wrapping It Up
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Leaving Winter Behind
So how did the cold and snowy winter affect your business? I
was speaking not long ago with one of the staffers at the Tri-Cities
Area Journal of Business, who mentioned to me that most of the
local business owners with whom she'd been speaking were reporting
a very slow winter thanks to those bitterly cold temperatures and
mountains of snow that lasted well into January. (For those of
you reading this outside the local area, the Tri-Cities Area Journal
of Business is a monthly newspaper that reports on issues important
to local businesses.)
In our world of web development, January typically begins our
busiest time of year. It's a time when many of our clients have
new money
available in their marketing budgets, and when many prospective
clients are just getting started on their new business venture
and need to open a web site. Businesses old and new have new
goals for the new year, and it's our job to help them reach those
goals.
But January was pretty slow compared to past years for us. Everything's
changing now, though, as warmer weather has arrived and the delays
caused by winter weather are a thing of the past. We're definitely
leaving winter behind. Hope you are, too.
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In The News
I promise one of these newsletters soon will be a Yahoo-free
zone. But they just keep doing things that get their name in the
news. This week's "big" news is the launch of what Yahoo
calls its SmartView technology. SmartView is a new feature that
adds more interactivity and local content to the existing Yahoo
Maps tool -- a tool which many of you have probably used at some
point to get driving directions from here to there.
To check it out, go to Yahoo
Maps and just type in any local
zip code. We'll use 99336 for this "test" of how it works.
After you do your search for "99336", Yahoo Maps presents
you with its map of the area. The SmartView technology is available
on the right. Yahoo Maps has always offered information about hotels,
restaurants, gas stations, etc. in the area that you're looking
at. But SmartView does it in a new and pretty cool way.
In the right column, click on "Food and Dining" and you
get about a dozen options for restaurant types. Click on "Italian",
and the map now shows a handful of Italian restaurants. You can
use the Zoom In/Out function on the left to tighten or expand the
map you're looking at. Click on one of the business markers --
such as Olive Garden, for example -- and you get a mini-window
with the business address, phone number, and links for more information.
If you're looking for hotels, that mini-window also shows room
rates, a 1-5 star rating, and a hotel's basic amenities.
It's obviously not perfect. Yahoo would have you believe there's
not a single golf course in the Tri-Cities, for example. And
clearly the listings they do have aren't complete. But overall,
I think
it's a great step forward for local search. It combines mapping,
yellow pages, and search engine features into one tool. It's
interactive and easy-to-use.
But you're not just a web searcher, you're a business owner and
you might want to know how you get your business and web site
to show up inside this SmartView tool. I'm not going to sit here
and
say this is some kind of golden egg that everyone should pursue
post haste to increase web traffic and profits. For many of you,
being listed here would have little immediate benefit. But if
you run a business geared toward travelers -- who no doubt make
up
the majority of Yahoo Maps users -- this might be something to
look into.
According to the news release, the data is coming from four sources:
Yahoo's search engine, Yahoo Yellow Pages, Yahoo Travel, and/or
Yahoo Movies -- depending on the kind of data you're looking
at. Compare, for example, the four Italian restaurants in Kennewick
from our test above with the four
Italian restaurants listed in
Yahoo's Yellow Pages.
They're exactly the same. Yahoo's Yellow Pages is handled by
a company called infoUSA, which maintains (and also sells or
licenses)
dozens of business and residential information databases. Their
web site offers plenty of information about how to buy a database,
but not much I can find about adding a listing to their databases
... other than this page:
http://list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm
If you click on "Add New Business Record" you get taken
to a form to fill out. Presumably a sales person will contact you.
I've never done this, nor helped a client do this, so I have no
idea what the costs might be. If any readers try this, let us know
what happens.
Links:
SmartView press release: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040309/95457_1.html
Yahoo Maps: http://maps.yahoo.com/
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More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
Yahoo Launches New Local Search Tool
March 10, 2004 - Reuters
Many in the industry believe that local Web search advertising
could be behind the next big online revenue boom.
Why Your Site Wasn't Indexed
March 09, 2004 - InternetNews.com
Lots of whiz-bang effects we're used to seeing
are also an impediment to getting indexed by search engines.
Forrester: Google To Weaken As War Rages
March 08, 2004 - WebProNews
Forrester Research, Inc., predicts Google's grasp on the
search industry will weaken.
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
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This Week's Q&A
Matt,
In the past few weeks we've been getting emails from strangers
who want to trade links with us. It looks like a form letter
and they say they've visited our site and would like to trade
links - they'll link to us if we link to them. Then they talk
about how linking helps add visitors to our site and helps us
in the search engines. Is this something we should consider?
Thanks.
David
Hi David -- These are form letters, and we're getting them, too!
Emails like these can be ignored, and should be ignored.
Yes, when other sites link to yours you stand to get some additional
traffic. And yes, linking can definitely help your position in
the search engines, particularly Google. But not all links are
beneficial. We'll be posting an article on owtweb.com soon about "The
Importance of Links," but in a nutshell here you go: You want
to avoid trading links with "link farms" and "free
for all" sites (sites that are nothing more than a big link
exchange web site). Links from those sites are useless, and links
to those sites on your own site can be grounds for ranking penalties.
These form emails you're getting are typically from these kinds
of sites. But, you may also occasionally get a legitimate email
from another business asking to trade links. You have to decide
if it's worth it -- will your site visitors be helped by finding
a link to this other site?
The most important thing about acquiring incoming links is to
acquire them from relevant, quality web sites. The best scenario
is when
you produce such scintillating content on your web site that
other sites want to link to your site without even asking.
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
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Wrapping it Up
Thanks to Yahoo's recent developments, these first three OWT
newsletters have been real heavy on the side of search engine news
and information. But we also want to talk about web development
and design in future issues. Remember that we welcome ideas, requests,
and suggestions for topics you'd like to see discussed in future
newsletters. Just use the email address listed above for questions.
See you next week!
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
The OWT Newsletter is a weekly service offered free to anyone
interested in learning more about web development, search engine
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