I just had to pass this one on. This is a real-life example of someone who was trying to find a hospital where a friend of his had been relocated, but couldn’t. All of his searching through Google wouldn’t let him find the right phone number.

In some cases, I can understand, but for a hospital?  This is one case where I do agree with him for sure – something should have been done.  It’s a great example of how not doing proper SEO will make it so that people trying to find you or your services will never be able to online.  In cases like that, the only way to pass on your site (and get traffic) is through offline marketing, be it on business cards or television commercials.  I think if you have a web site, it’s silly to have it sitting on the web without getting any natural traffic.  But that’s where SEO comes into play.

At any rate, if you want the full details on this crazy hospital example, check out Alan Bleiweiss’s SEO story.  It’s a doozy.

Google AdWords has had an update recently, and it now appears you can actually advertise and have your address appear on Google Maps with your ad:

Example of AdWords on Google Maps

Example of AdWords on Google Maps

This involves having Google Local set up (also known as Local Business Center).  If you don’t know how to do this, you can check out my earlier post on putting your business on Google Maps.

Once you have a business account set up and associated with the same address you have on your AdWords account, you can get your ad to show up on Google Maps by editing your Campaign settings and then under Locations, open the “Show relevant addresses with your ads (advanced)” option.

AdWords Campaign Setup

AdWords Campaign Setup

Here the easy way to do it is to choose the first option, which is to select your Google Local Business Center account, which will put your address information into your ad and also put a matching blue “pushpin” on Google Maps for you.

The alternate choice you have (if you don’t have an associated Google Local account set up) is to put in the address and phone number manually, in the second option here.  This will also display this information with your ad.

Keep in mind, the only way this will work is if the keyword that is being searched on is relevant to the locality your address is in.  For example, a city name.  (Just the way Google Maps normally appears in search results.)  If your keywords match this type of query, then your address and phone number will appear with your ad, in addition to a little point on Google Maps.  And this is great news for anyone who does local advertising.

It appears Google and YouTube are starting to put in something new – automated captioning.  This will help a lot for people who are unable to receive the audio for either physical or mechanical reasons.  It’s going to start with English only, but they will be using voice recognition software to turn the audio into legible captions.

There is word that this update may affect SEO, but I have my curiosities about this.  It can only truly affect SEO if the captions are somehow written into the page code.  We can only see if this is the case once this new development in YouTube goes live.  We’ll see how it turns out.

It looks like with the latest AdWords update, they’re starting to put any local advertisements in Google AdWords into Google Maps.  You can see images of some examples of that here, in Search Engine Land.

The ads appear almost the same as Google Local listings, only with blue numbered pushpins instead of red lettered pushpins.  I’ll most definitely have to look further into AdWords to see exactly how to take advantage of this new update.

So the Associated Press has stepped up and actually scanned a full book to be available for search (Sarah Palin’s book, to be specific).  The funny thing about this is that they have openly protested Google doing the same thing with story headlines and summaries as going beyond fair use.

Who’s in the right?  Is this something that’s going to blow up in the AP’s… face?  More details from Danny Sullivan here.

When doing SEO, one of the most underutilized tools I know of is actually Google AdWords.  The benefits of how running an AdWords campaign can help SEO in various ways are numerous, and a lot of straight SEOs aren’t even aware of it.

Dave Davis of Redfly is a PPC pro, and he covers the crossover nicely in this post.

Yes, even the BBC is starting to adjust to the new wave of internet marketing.  It appears that they’re starting to consider SEO when writing their news posts online.  And keep in mind for the BBC, SEO stands for search engine optimisation, not the silly search engine optimization we talk about.

Enough of their traffic comes from the web and search engines, so they are making changes.  It’s true!  I read it on the Guardian.

So what SEO tools are out there, available online, to save you time and money?  Are there any that are worthwhile?  I actually think so.  Some of the big ones that I use include Yahoo Site Explorer and the Google AdWords Tool.  There are several other tools that people use, some of them cost to use, some of them are free.  (The above tools are free.)  So what’s worth using?

Well, Chris Boggs from Search Engine Watch has put together a really nice list of different quality SEO tools.  For the most part, I think his list is solid.  Not sure why he’s an IE man (I won’t question that too much, it can only lead to something bad), but his choice of tools for search engine optimization is solid.

One tip he mentioned that I think is worth saying again – make sure any of the methods in which the tools help you are things you already know how to do!  It’s worth extra time to learn how to do it manually first.  Then you can go on to find a tool to save your time and effort, and still have the skills that tool applies towards.

It looks like smaller cities are starting to see their businesses move more online with web sites, online marketing and social networking.  This would not surprise me too much to see, as the demand here for Tulsa SEO has increased, as well as for Tulsa website design.  I’m willing to bet it’s very similar in other cities.

In this case, it appears that Columbus is definitely on the list of cities rising in their online presence, and it’s showing for several different types of markets.

So it seems like some security guys have found a few new attacks, posted as image links on blogs.  These posts are engineered to end up on high Google results, but point to malware sites.  It apparently doesn’t work on up to date server software, so keeping your updates current is a good idea.

You can get more details here and here.