Renegade Search

Today Google announced that they are rolling out longer meta description snippets for some keyword searches. The new feature will appear in search results for queries that are 3 words or longer and have a very specific intent. So for example, if you are searching for something like "Google Rolls Out Extended Snippets" you'll see some results that have longer meta description snippets (3 or 4 lines instead of only 2) like this:

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Every once in a while even the biggest of websites have server issues or temporary bandwidth problems. While we always push custom error pages for 404 pages and other applicable error codes for SEO and usability sake, it is interesting to see how the big boys handle such issues.

Here is the top part of the page I just saw when causing a 500 internal server error:

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The day has arrived - Yahoo! has finally given more control to their advertisers with day parting. This has been a long available technology in Google, and a long desired option in YSM. Day parting essentially allows an advertiser to block their ads for showing during certain times of the day or from entire days. This is great if you only want a campaign running during business hours, or when you notice a trend that your cost per conversion skyrockets on only Saturdays. Of course, this could always have been done manually, but just setting it up in the interface itself does give advertisers and PPC managers more peace of mind that this is consistently being done.

Check out some instruction and Yahoo! day parting screenshots.

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One of the most important things a local business can do is to create a locally visible presence. 20 years ago a billboard may have seemed like the best option. Perhaps a 30 second spot on local television, or maybe a newspaper ad. Not having a Yellow Pages was small business suicide as it was the only place that people would actively look for what your small business had to offer. Today more and more people are jumping online to actively find local businesses.

It's said that as much as 40% of all online searches have a local intent, with a said whopping 80% of commercial searches having local intent. This makes sense. If I search for "pet store", I almost assuredly am looking for one in Chicago, where I live, and not in Florida. It's not the most refined search, but these generic searches certainly occur with regularity.

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