Frequent readers know that for five months a year, I have college basketball on the brain. But while the hardwood is vacant, I happily fix my gaze upon the college gridiron for a few months. My assertion with this article is that the college football BCS serves as a great analogy for Local Search–only in this case BCS stands for “Best Citation Sources.” The post looks at why InfoUSA, SuperPages, Acxiom, Localeze, Yelp and InsiderPages are so important in Local Search.

I continue my monthly website design award series, showcasing seven websites I’ve come across recently deserving of special mention. Featured this month are HellYeahDude, 5th Avenue Theatre, Unit Interactive, Jonathan Yuen, the School District of Philadelphia, Trale, and Conde Nast Portfolio.

Amidst all the negative publicity from the failed Microsoft merger (that, like the old man in Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail, appears to be “not dead yet”), Yahoo is proving that it still has the potential to be an innovative company. Their Local Search interface blows Google’s away.

A Soon-to-Be Must for Small Businesses
My friend Eric Lander, in addition to writing some very nice things about me and the Local Search Ranking Factors project yesterday, also highlighted a very important news note in the Local space: Best of the Web has just launched a Local directory, appropriately named BOTW Local.
Greg Hartnett, President of [...]

I invited 20 leaders in the Local Search Marketing community to rate the importance of 47 criteria with respect to their influence on rankings in the Google and Yahoo Local “Universal” search algorithms (those that drive the 3-pack, 10-pack, and authoritative onebox search results and NOT the standard organic algorithms). Selected responses and some commentary from yours truly are contained in this post, as well as a link to the full survey results.

Greg Sterling reported last week that Google is now asking searchers to tell them their ZIP codes so that they can return geo-relevant results. In this post I take a look at some of the implications of this development, and expand on an earlier hypothesis about why Google introduced the 10-pack to Universal search in the first place. Yes, ZIP code targeting means more relevant results for searchers, but it’s an innovation that might not be entirely altruistic.

A couple of my favorite SEO firms, Distilled UK, of London, England and NetConcepts of Madison, WI have announced efforts in recent days that will help make the world a better place, using SEO and SEM. Here are a couple of brief summaries of those efforts, with an idea of how you can get [...]

In this lengthy post (sorry, it must some kind of delayed reaction to Twitter’s 140-character limitation) I’ll try to explain a hypothesis about optimization for the Google Local algorithm (along with the 10-pack, 3-pack and authoritative OneBox) that’s been brewing in my mind for the past couple of months. It has really crystallized this week in various discussions I’ve had with other Local SEOs, including Mike Blumenthal, EarlPearl, and David Klein, and after reading a blog post by Stephen Espinosa.

Other experts, especially Bill Slawski and Mike Blumenthal (in fact, I think Mike may have been the first person to turn me onto the word “citation” in some of my conversations with him?) have postulated the importance of “citations” for quite awhile, but for whatever reason, the concept never really hit home for me until recently.

With this post, I’m launching a monthly series where eventually I’ll share some link love for impressive website designs. Eventually this will be a showcase for sites I’ve found in the last 30 days, but for the first couple of editions, I’ll be running through a bunch of the sites I’ve tagged in my del.icio.us account.

There’s no official nomination process, so feel free to email sites you’d like me to consider for June. Where possible, I’ll credit both the site and the designer.

May 27th, 2008 Update:
After approximately four weeks under severe Google penalty, it appears that my blog is back in Google’s good graces. I’m back to #2 for search terms like “Flash Vs HTML websites,” which is more or less right where I was before the whole thing started.
When I submitted my request, Google said [...]