A few weeks ago, Erin Marton (aka @burghliving) asked me to give a presentation for Realtors at the R-Day Conference here in Pittsburgh. Since many Realtors are managing their own website and online marketing, I put together a presentation that anyone could use to better understand internet marketing and SEO.

The following PowerPoint presentation was geared for Realtors, but I think that anyone – be it a small business owner managing their own online marketing or a busy marketing executive exploring the options online, could benefit from this overview of SEO and what it involves.

Enjoy!

The Yellow Pages? Those annoying large books left on my door step, wasting paper because no one has used them since the invention of the Internet? Noooo….not THOSE yellow pages, rather YellowPages.com or YP.com, as it’s known these days, the ONLINE version of the bulky books, which people actually DO still use.

As a local business, I’m sure you’re trying to find the best ways to market your local business online and if you’re not, you should be, if only to Increase Your Local Search Results. One way to spread the word, help increase your SEO, and join the 21st century is to list your business, not just with search engines, but with local directories, too.

As a small or local business, it might seem like a simple thing to do: to submit your URL to the Yellow Pages website. But go to YellowPages.com and there is no link and no section that says “add your business” or “submit URL”. Why not? Isn’t it free, you ask. Yes, it is free to list your site — of course they (YellowPages.com) want you to pay for advertising, but you don’t have to pay for advertising to get your site listed — it’s free. And if you click on the link on YellowPages.com that says Advertise With Us, you’ll be taken to the correct page to submit your URL on YellowPages.com and list your site, which is here.

This site takes you away from YellowPages.com and its branding and moves you over to ATT Advertising Solutions. Which is confusing. But it’s still free and it’s still the YellowPages or YP.com.

These are the series of logos you may pass in your quest to list your website for free on YellowPages.com

Once you’ve reached the ATT Advertising Solutions page, you must click the link that says “Get Started”. From here, you’ll enter your business phone number to see if you’re website/business is already listed. If not, you’ll be taken through a series of questions to get your site listed. This should take you somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes, depending on how fast you type and what information you’d like included.

Now here’s the tricky part: after you’ve finished providing your business details, YellowPages.com, or YP.com, or ATT Advertising Solutions, or whatever they want to call themselves, requires you to verify by phone, which means they will call you with a code, and then you will need to enter the code into your website profile before proceeding. The phone number they call HAS TO BE the phone number you provided for your business. And YOU HAVE TO ANSWER the phone, because this is when YellowPages.com will tell you the code, which you will then use to type into your profile.

There is, unfortunately, no option to verify by mail, and it’s best to not even bother filling out your company information unless you are ready to verify by phone, because you can’t save your work and come back later.

So that’s it, and that’s enough. Your listing should look something like this when you’re finished.

The Yellow Pages isn’t the only place you should list your website online. There are plenty more sites, like Yelp, and HotFrog. Here is a list of more sites for local businesses to submit to.

By the way, if you’re fancy and tech savvy enough, opt out of receiving the Yellow Pages that come to your door step by going to: www.yellowpagesoptout.com

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Hey, someone actually reads my posts, because @nezencreation tweeted me after reading this to say that he followed my instructions but the Google Chrome browser ‘went into an endless loop at the “call me” step’. Which is unfortunate, since this is the last step and that’s a real pain in butt. So…..use Firefox or Explorer browsers when setting up your account until YP.com gets their bug fixed.

I was Googling around, checking in on some local listings and seeing if Pittsburgh’s Google Local listings (or ‘Places’, whatever it Google is calling it today) had any of the new changes that Andrew Shotland was talking about in his blog post last night, when I noticed that Google Instant is very screwy.

First I was Googling for ‘pittsburgh dui lawyers’ (not for myself, for a client!!) and then I wondered if a more common search term would display the new changes, so I typed in ‘pittsburgh dentists’, and this is what happened:

So there is one dentist (the first result) that comes up in the sponsored results, but the rest of the PPC ads are lawyers, left over from my previous search. All of the organic listings are dentists.

Obviously, you can see where this could cause problems. My questions is, if I were to click on one of the “Lawyer” pay-per-click ads after using “pittsburgh dentists” as a search term, would the law firm be charged for that click? I know the lawyer isn’t bidding on “pittsburgh dentists” for a keyword!!

These two search terms are completely unrelated, but what happens when search terms ARE more closely related, for instance, what if I typed in “tennis shoes” and then Googled “work shoes” — will Adwords advertisers be charged for clicks they didn’t bid on?

Would love to hear your insight and comments.

p.s. Notice that Google Places (what I was originally trying to have displayed) did not show up at all!!