By: Andy Beal | Source: webpronews.com

comScore Networks Just released new data on the growth of of the local search market.

According to the study, 63 percent of U.S. Internet users (or approximately 109 million people) performed a local search online in July, a 43-percent increase versus July of 2005. Google Sites (30 percent) and Yahoo! Sites (29 percent) garnered the largest share of local searches in July. Microsoft Sites captured 12 percent of local searches, followed by the Time Warner Network with 7 percent.

It’s interesting to note what people are searching for:

59% were searching for a restaurant or other entainment venues
52% were searching for business phone numbers

Even more interesting is that these local searchers take action:

47% visited a local merchant after searching
41% made contact offline
37% made contact online

Local search is growing at a fast clip with more than 849 million local searches conducted in the US in July.

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By: Loren Baker | Source: searchenginejournal.com

Yahoo has signed another search toolbar and home page distribution partnership with a large computer manufacturer, this time Hewlett-Packard Co. The Yahoo / HP deal is the second announced this month, as Yahoo and Acer formed a similar partnership on September 14th.

The Yahoo-HP deal will distribute Yahoo toolbars on all HP computers in the United States and Europe as well as featuring a default custom Yahoo.com home page for HP users. Quick links to Yahoo Mail, Finance and News will also be included.

Once launched, Yahoo will be the preferred search service on the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 browser on all North American HP computers.

“Partnering with a company like HP, that has been a leader in its industry for many years, puts Yahoo! in an excellent position to be able to distribute our most widely adopted offerings, like Yahoo! Search and the new Yahoo! Mail, to an even broader audience across the globe,” said Dan Rosensweig, chief operating officer, Yahoo! Inc. “This relationship is an important component of Yahoo!’s overall strategy to partner with leading global brands that will enable us to further extend our products and services to the world’s community of Internet users.”

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By: Lee Odden

From: toprankblog.com

There’s all sorts of buzz about blogs lately and yet so many companies are still wondering what to do about it. In fact, there are a tremendous number of business blogs that are not realizing much of their potential visibilty on the web. Why? Because they’re not optimized.

This is very much the same scenario that occurred with web sites in the late nineties. Back then I worked with a company that sold web sites – lots of them. But after getting the site up and running, the traffic didn’t come by itself. So we figured out optimizing for search engines and that was the start of my SEO career. Blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.

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