The Woodlands, Texas – February 26, 2010 – GoLocal247.com, a division of The User-Friendly Phone Book, is now tweeting content to Twitter posted by local business owners and site visitors about local companies on its network of 32 hyperlocal Yellow Pages business directory sites in eight states.

Each of the 32 sites has its own geo-targeted Twitter account, which tweets recent reviews, new coupons and links to featured profiles on the GoLocal247 site about local businesses. Coupons and featured profile links are the result of small businesses updating their listing and profile information, while recent reviews are generated by site visitors.

Reviews, coupons and featured profiles on the GoLocal247 network are fed to Twitterfeed via three different RSS feeds available for each local site. The technology of sharing content posted across the GoLocal247 network with Twitter provides small businesses additional exposure of the company on Twitter and in Google, Yahoo and Bing search engine results.

“The local twitter accounts allow us to reach a new audience of Web surfers looking for local business information but not searching our GoLocal247 network directly,” said Mary Beth Brendza, VP, Operations at The User-Friendly Phone Book and GoLocal247.com. “The tweets to our business profile landing pages increases awareness of our local sites and provides additional, free marketing exposure for the thousands of small business advertisers on our sites. We are hoping our advertisers see an increase in traffic to their profile page on the GoLocal247 network, the business’s Web site, and experience higher in-store coupon redemptions.”

Twitter was the fastest growing social network in 2009 and is considered to be the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace. Google and Bing recently updated their search algorithms to include tweets in real-time search results. Industry experts suggest businesses that embrace social media opportunities via social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube will benefit from the increased visibility social networking provides.

About GoLocal247.com

The GoLocal247 network is one of the fastest growing community-focused website companies in the country with Web sites in parts of California, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. The company took the hyper-local approach by building community portals with a robust Yellow Page business directory. The first site launched in June 2008 and is now comprised of 32 local sites in eight states.

The heart of GoLocal247 is a robust Yellow Page business directory. Users can locate thousands of in-depth profiles on local businesses, rate and review them, and utilize money-savings coupons. They also can browse and post free classified ads, view and add events to the community calendar, and catch up on the latest news, entertainment and sports happening in the community and around the world.

Golocal247 is the internet division of The User-Friendly Phone Book, a portfolio company of VS&A Communications Partners III, LP — the private equity affiliate of media industry merchant bank Veronis Suhler Stevenson. Learn more about GoLocal247.com at www.golocal247.com. For more information about The User-Friendly Phone Book, visit www.ufpb.net.

On the older version of the sites, “keyword” information was stored in the administrative side of the sites and not viewable to the end users. It was initially created to help with on-site search performance.

However, we soon realized that the information being included in this hidden field was extremely valuable for search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

So, with the launch of the new sites, this field was unhidden and divided into two new fields that appear in the General Contact Information area of a profile: Areas Served and Tags (also known as “keywords”). Click on the links below for examples:

• Alexandria247.com: A-Safe Mini-Storage
• TheDesert247.com: Anna’s Cleaning Service

Not only do these fields aid with on-site searches, but because they are now visible on the profile page, search engines can now crawl these keywords as well — possibly increasing a business profile’s page rank. The same keywords could also be used to build a platinum customer’s search engine marketing campaign.

The same information can still appear in the “About Us” section of a profile but by including attributes in the designated fields, site visitors will get better search results and the information in these fields will be in a consistent place for site visitors to reference for this information.

Notes about these fields:

• Areas Served — the state abbreviation must always appear next to the city name; no need to include every city — just reference 1 or 2 from the north, south, east and west of the business’ primary location; referencing larger suburbs of an area is better than listing a lot of smaller suburbs or rural areas.

• Tags — reference the business’ top products, brands and services; more than 20 keywords/keyword phrases will overwhelm the customer and not be valuable; you can always provide more information in the “About Us” area.

Here’s an example of a profile that has way too many attributes listed in the Areas Served and Tags fields. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing except that it pushes the About Us content down on the page and may be overwhelming to a site visitor:

• Cleveland247.com: Peak Pest Control & Termite Services

Do you have that little tingle in your throat? Are you running a fever? We’ve all had the flu at one point or another in our lives; if you haven’t, then you are Superman or Superwoman.  So how do you get the flu virus? According to the CDC “the main way the flu viruses are spread is from person to person”.  So what they are saying is that you catch this essentially by “word of mouth”. So it starts with just one person and spreads to another, then another and so on. See example below:

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“What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.” (Six Principles of Viral Marketing)
What type of message are we trying to pass along to others to create the potential for exponential growth?
How did you hear about Google? How did you hear about Facebook? Did you see their catchy commercials with the talking Dolphin on them? NO, you heard from a friend of a friend or a co-worker. Example:  Bill T. telling everyone about Facebook and Kerri talking about social marketing/networking —- VIRAL MARKETING!!

The light bulb should be coming on now…….”So that’s why I’ve been hearing about our new social page lately”. We are the only yellow pages company in the country to have a social network attached to our business directory!  This is really something to promote and be proud of.
As we are working on the grand scheme of things, we need each any every one of you all to get this internet juggernaut of Golocal going in your respective markets.

First step is to start a profile on your local website (cleveland247.com, tulsa247.com).

Second step, invite every person, friend or acquaintance you know.  Imagine if every person you invite tells just 3 people about this, I wonder what would happen?

If 300 people tell 3 people each…

300 x 3 = 900 People

what if those 900 people told another 3 people…

900 x 3 = 2700

what if those 2700 people told another 3 people…

2700 x 3 = 8100

Third step, have fun with it!!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making websites easily to find and rank by Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. This type of search is generally referred to as “organic” or “un-paid” search.

Statistics show that the first page (10 listings) of a search receive over 68% of the clicks, and only 8% review more than the first three pages or results. The closer to the number 1 position you can be the more traffic your site will receive.

All of our online communities like Cleveland247.com, LakeCharles247.com and Tulsa247.com have been developed with SEO in mind. Not only are all of our pages search engine friendly, but the profiles within our directories are individually optimized for search.

How do search engines find and rank sites? For demonstration purposes, we’ll use Google, considering their market share is 64.6%. They use computer programs to automatically scan or “crawl” the internet for new web pages. Google then uses an algorithm to determine what order or “rank” each website gets for every search. This algorithm is top secret and consists of over 500 million variables.

In essence Golocal247.com provides direction and maps for Google to use to find all of the information and pages on our website, in addition to staying educated on the various factors of the Google algorithm to provide the best ranking possible.

Lately we’ve been hearing a lot of concerns over “guaranteed” first place ranking. It has come to our attention that there are businesses selling such a guarantee. To be frank, this is a lie. Because Google’s algorithm is top secret and has over 500 million variables, no one can guarantee anything, not even a first page ranking. I’ll be writing more about this in the coming week, so stay check back often.