Kids and thier actions

July 3rd, 2009

Blog Response to - http://utteringthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/07/another-odd-observation-or-oddservation.html

I would have to agree with with this posting, but I’m sure many people have been in the situation at a store when the kid is having a freak out over you saying no… and everyone in the place looks at you like your the worst person in the world. Most of the time they don’t have kids of their own yet they are very judging. So blame has to go on current adults who would rather scathe at people than understand the discipline your trying to teach your child.  This is the main cause for kids getting away with many of the poor attitude as parents don’t always want to be judged so harshly.

You should have seen the looks I got when I picked up my son over my shoulder and walked out of the store during one of these sessions, you would have thought I had beaten him with a stick for how some people were staring at me. Then again one woman approached my wife and said it was good to see someone not letting a child get away with that type of actions.

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TalkNB Canada Day Fun

July 3rd, 2009

Swing over to http://www.talknb.com to check out the Canada Day Fun.

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Add your Business to Google Local Business Center

July 3rd, 2009

This is a must do for any business of any-size whether you have a website or not, and the best part it’s Free.

www.google.com/local/add

It requires you to have a Google account but don’t worry if you don’t as you can sign up from this page using an existing email account and making it a google account, so you don’t have to add on another email address to your ever growing list if your like myself.

Google walks you through each step of getting your business listed added and confirmed either by postcard or phone. I won’t repeat the steps here as you will already be on thier site with the directions in front of you, instead I will highlight the benefits.

When someone searches in google for your business or a general term/phrase for your type of business a map will show up at the top of the results displaying the local businesses. As an example you can search google for Saint John Bowling,
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=Saint+John+Bowling&btnG=Search&meta=

Here you can see the map, that shows the different businesses who have used Local Business Center to list their business and it shows them on the map so people can quickly see the location. In this example we did not search for a specific business but a general phrase but these business get prime placement for taking just a few minutes out of their day, and no on going cost.

This is a great way to reach your local audience for both specific and broad phrase searches.

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Canada Day

July 1st, 2009

I hope Everyone has a Great Canada Day and enjoy’s a day off and celebrations!!

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Bing! Microsoft Search - Still Missing Something

June 30th, 2009

I have started using bing and I like how it works and I’m not going into comparing Bing with google as I like both Search Engines. However after using it there is a couple of things that I’d like to touch on as it affects businesses with websites and without.

1. No Auto Map?? - Now I figured this would be standard with any good search engine that if you search for a business name with location information that if there it should show it on the map. I was disappointed to find that when doing this type of search that wasn’t readily available.
The Search - elitegd saint john new brunswick
Bing Result
Google Result

How this effects you? - Well if your like me and you have a website doesn’t really effect you to much as you can see i’m showing in the top 4 returned results directing them to my website. However if you do a search and someone only has the Local Business Listing through Google Maps you now won’t show up at all.

The Search - laundry mat saint john new brunswick
Bing Result
Google Result
If there was any Laundry mat with even a basic website up they would receive 100% of the web traffic from Bing as currently none of them show up at all, even though all three are listed on Google Maps. This is why you don’t want to always focus on Google but focus on reaching all search engines.

2.  Bing Local Listing Center

Now I was very dissapointed when I went to add my own business that being from Canada there is no way to add yourself to Bing’s Local Listing Center, similar to google’s Local Business Center I have tried doing multiple searches to figure out a way for Canadian businesses to add their listing to the Bing Local Listing Center and haven’t found a way. This should be  a staple as well for any real competitive search engines, to at least be able to take submissions if your going to offer local searches. Hopefully this is just in the works and once I find a way I will be doing a post on adding your business to both Bing Local Listing Center, and Google’s Local Business Center.

Recommendation if you are relying on Google Map ( Local Business Center) to deliver your information invest in a small informational website so that you can make sure that other search engines that people use will direct people to your business and not a competitor’s.

Stay tuned i’ll be doing another reaching your target audience for Laundry Mats next after realizing this when researching for this post.

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