For high-value search phrases, organic results are heavily biased against local businesses: large companies, yellow page publishers, directories, franchisors all have a huge advantage in generating the in-bound links that drive high search engine rankings.

So this is great for local businesses, and it’s great for those searching for information on them.

It also makes clear that these Local Results are the next front in Search Engine Optimazation for small, local businesses and service providers.

So how can you get your business to a) show up in the local results and b) get a high ranking in them? Google’s not really showing their hand (beyond what they have to, like patent filings).

But Mike Blumenthal has taken an educated guess about the major factors in Google’s local results:

First, there are factors that determine whether your business is relevant to the search results:

1. Address in city of search
2. Listing confirmed by listing in Google Local Business Center or by a data licensor
3. Business categories relate to search phrase
4. Business name relates to search phrase
5. Address is confirmed by your site or a linking site

And second, there are factors that determine where your business ranks relative to other results:

1. PageRank of the business’s site
2. Number of reviews in the Google Local Business Center (quantity trumps quality)
3. Number of web references
4. Quality of web references

Take-aways?

• Get a great website
• Make sure your address is on your site
• Do best-practice SEO activities on your site (esp. focusing on “off site factors” like high-quality in-bound links)
• Create or take ownership of your business listing in Google Local Business Center
• Ask your customers to review your business on Google Local
• Get a listing with a local data provider

We’ll be paying close attention to thinking on local search rankings as it evolves.

One thing’s for sure—local results are rapidly becoming high-value real estate for local businesses.

But I have a question—how did you feel reading this headline?

One of the most fundamental copy writing lessons is “stress the benefit, not the feature.”

It turns out that recent neurological research shows that reading about a benefit makes your brain fire as if you’ve experienced it.

In other words, our brains crave beneficial copy

Our newest “sound in-bound” tip is a new service from Intuit, the makers of QuickBooks, called JumpUp

They describe it as a site “that helps new businesses get up and running quickly and successfully.” There’s lots of great information on the site that may help you with your business.

But, more importantly, they let you create profile pages, with, yep, links back to your website.

Getting a linkback from an inuit.com domain? Now that’s pretty valuable.

So go create your jumpup profile! (And don’t forget the link back to your site…)

Microsoft has a new Add-In for Excel 2007 that provides all sorts of cool keyword slicing and dicing capabilities.

Here’s an overview and a set of video tutorials

For anyone currently advertising on Yahoo! or thinking about it, you might be interested in their “new and improved” PPC platform coming out later this year. Yahoo! promises, among other things, better local targeting and the ability to launch campaigns faster.

Check out the article at Forbes.com

More detailed info can be read on the blog at SearchEngineWatch

Check out the news item at ACHRNews.

For background and more information, there’s a whole site devoted to explaining and highlighting energy tax incentives.

Whether you’re installing HVAC or plumbing equipment or you own your home or the building your business operates out of, these are worth checking out.

(Via the great ACCAbuzz blog.)

If you’re like me, though, reading through the federal budget is just about the definition of hell.

Here’s a great chart that makes it a lot easier to grasp where our federal tax dollars flow, and what agencies and programs are getting relatively more or less than others.

Joyent offers simple, powerful, web-based software that provides small teams with email, calendars, contacts, and shared applications.

Other features include file sharing, searching, group-based permissions control, and other geeky and not-so-geeky options.

As one who has set up many of these systems in offices over the years, the current options for setting up these apps are either do it yourself, or hire a computer consultant to come in and do it for you—neither of which is ideal.

Joyent, starting at $15/mo. may very well be a great third alternative.

Of course I recommend us for his website, logo and search engine marketing.

Of my other recommendations, one that he was most impressed with was RingCentral. It’s a “virtual PBX” that can be used to set up voice prompts, call distribution groups, time-of-day number forwarding, all sorts of stuff.

It’s around $25/mo, and I’ve found it to be very useful.

I’ll check in with my brother-in-law in a couple of months and see if he’s still finding it useful, too.

I suspected that I may have found the key while reading yet another article on time management (there are a million of them out there!). Business coach Tom Hopkins encourages small business owners to distinguish between “opportunity time” and “replenishment time,” and to treat them as equally valuable to their success.

To begin with, you must understand there are two entirely different kinds of time. The first is opportunity time, during which you achieve your business goals such as selecting new products to market, doing some test marketing, and providing follow-up service to existing clients. The second is replenishment time, during which you rebuild your strength through exercise, recreation, relaxation and sleep.

Here’s the rest of the article: How to Manage Your Time