105. Local business on the web
By Andrew D. Wright
It's a good idea for small businesses, including those that only sell to
locals, to have a website. Even a simple "placecard" site with just
address and contact information that can be put up cheaply by someone with
no previous experience will help to bring in customers.
People looking for what you are selling are likely to search for it
online. The trouble with online searches has been the results are usually
for websites all over the world when you are just looking for that pizza
place down the street.
Search engines work by collecting information from web pages then
organizing that information so it can be quickly sorted. "Spiders" are the
programs that gather the information. They read the title of the web page,
the headlines and the page content as well as the page's META tags, pick
out the key words from all that for indexing then follow any links off of
the page. They then do the same for all linked pages before scooting off
home to report what they have found.
META tags are like comments left in the hidden head part of the web page.
Typically there is a description of the site - a short sentence less than
20 words saying what the site is about, and a listing of keywords - words
that someone searching for the site might look for.
Different search engines index the information different ways. In general
good information is information that is repeated through the page. If the
spider sees a term in the META tags, and the same term is also repeated in
the content of the page, then it is more likely this is a valid term to
index.
Some people try to game the system by putting in lots of keywords that
don't apply so that their pages will come up more often on different
searches. Search engines work hard to correct for this sort of trick since
it makes their searches less reliable.
One of the fastest growing areas of online searching is local business
searching. Last year industry leader Google started letting businesses add
their own information for inclusion with the Google Earth and Google Maps
services.
A local business owner can list their website, their location and business
hours, what category of business they are and even offer online coupons.
Just last week Google added the ability to modify the business location on
the map as well as adding a photograph to the listing.
Someone can go to Google Maps, search for your business and town and get a
map showing your location (regular map, satellite photo or mix of the two)
while they read your business info and get directions. They can click on a
link to your business website. It's free to them to search and the listing
is free to you as the business owner. You don't even need to have a GMail
address to register your business.
This is not without its downside though. Google is so big that updating
information can take weeks, months or even years.
Halifax Regional Municipality Businesses on the Web:
http://www.halifax.ca/business/busindex.html
Google Maps (Link on page to Add/Edit Your Business):
http://maps.google.ca/
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Originally published 25 March 2007
