Are YellowPages History Now?

Yellowpages – History?
Phonebooks: A serious case of pulp friction
by Tania Deluzuriaga, New York Times News Service

 

They’re the original search engines, leftover from the days of rotary

phones and answering machines. Once valued reference books kept in a

certain drawer or cabinet for easy and frequent access, the massive

telephone directories landing on doorsteps and in apartment foyers

across the city in recent weeks seemed bound for more ignoble destinations.

Days after hundreds of thousands of the 2,000-page, 4-pound tomes were

delivered, they began showing up in recycling bins and trash dumpsters.

 

From Beacon Hill to Jamaica Plain, they moldered on porches and driveways,

lay strewn across sidewalks, and sat in large, untouched piles in condo and

apartment buildings.

 

In an era when consumers are increasingly conscious of the waste they

generate, arrival of the phone books was greeted with an annoyed sigh or

worse.

 

“All that’s waste,” grumbled Gerri Cummings, 70, eyeing the waist-high

pile of phone books orphaned in the foyer of her South Boston apartment 

building.

 

Yellow Book delivered stacks of its yellow pages directories, enough for each

of the residents of Cummings’ 96-unit building for the elderly and disabled.

A few days later, Verizon did the same.

“All my phone numbers are in my phone,” Cummings said, waving a silver

cellphone that she keeps in her pocket.

A few blocks away, 33-year-old Jason Muth vented his disgust in his blog.

 

“Each time I’m greeted by piles of bound paper at my doorstep, I think the

same exact thing: what a waste,” he wrote. “The energy to distribute and

manufacture these, the raw materials used to print these, and our time to

dispose of them properly.”

 

When Verizon delivered its directories a couple days later, Muth’s disgust

turned to anger. Of the 10 directories delivered to his address this month,

not one made it inside, he said.

“What industry is indiscriminately allowed to throw their product on your

front step and leave you to deal with it?” he fumed in a phone interview.

“It’s environmentally wrong; it’s morally wrong.”

 

Representatives from Verizon and Yellow Book declined to speak to a

reporter about their products or distribution practices. In a written

statement, a Verizon spokesman said the company has regionalized its

directory and made it smaller and more user-friendly. Yellow Book, which

distributed 883,000 copies of its directory in the Boston area last year,

said that 87 percent of adults use a print phone directory at least once

a year.

“We get complaints from people when they don’t get their phone book,”

said Stephanie Hobbs, a spokeswoman for the Yellow Pages Association,

the industry’s trade organization.

 

For those who don’t want it, there is little recourse. Unlike services that let

consumers sign up for no-call lists to stop cold-calling advertisers, it’s not so

easy to avoid getting the phone book. Some directory companies have phone

numbers that residents can call to stop phone book deliveries to their homes,

but the numbers can be hard to locate. And governments say they are

constrained in imposing blanket restrictions.

“It’s a First Amendment issue,” said Sharon Gillett, commissioner of the state

Department of Telecommunications and Cable. “How are they different from

free newspapers or political fliers?”

 

Despite competition from the Internet, the phone directory market continues

to slowly grow, with a value this year of about billion, according to the

Yellow Pages Association.

 

While services like Google and 411 are providing heightened competition, people

still turn to their yellow pages when they are ready to buy, Hobbs said, citing a

third-party study that found American adults consulted phone books 13.4 billion

times last year.

 

But even some advertisers in the books say they’re questioning the practice.

“I keep contemplating whether I should give it up; it costs me a fortune,” said

Scott Ruth, a Marlborough plumber who ran an ad for his business in the Boston

Yellow Book.

 

Though business has been good, Ruth said, he has all the work he can handle,

and he is not sure that spending “several thousand dollars” a year on

advertising in the phone book is worth it.

 

“I haven’t picked one up in I don’t know how long,” he said.

 
Moral of this story? If your company is not on the first page of search results in Google, you are for all practical purposes: Invisible

David Bruce Jr

Frederick Web Promotions

What are backlinks and why do I need them?

Backlinks 101

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.

Where they come from and how the anchor text is written is critical to achieving success in the search engine results pages.
Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts

Back links are really important. What I am noticing with my WordPress blog is that if I keep saturating it with good content, lots of ping backs are coming in from related blogs. The links are building because of the quality of the information that I am posting.

When we say that more number of incoming links pointing toward your website defines Link Popularity, we are talking about your “website’s worthiness”. Link Popularity isn’t a chemical formula that can be attained by mixing two or more components. Gaining maximum number of links pointing to your website requires skills, backed up by your website’s worthiness. If your site is worthy of a link, you can earn a great profit with Link Popularity. And if it isn’t, all your Link Building efforts might go in vain!

How does one get listed in Google locally?

For example this blog is about geting your Maryland small business ranked in the first ten Google search resutls.

Sidebar for SEO nomenclature: SERP. when you search for anything in Google what comes up is a SERP serp=search engine results page and that page consists of: 10 Organic or ‘natural’ search results in the body or middle of the serp page. One the right hand side are sponsored links or advertisements. the first three search results above the organic are often sponsored links. Sometimes when searching for local products or services Google shows what it calls Google Business Listings. Those are garnered from Google Maps.

So how does one get ranked in Google locally? like for Maryland for example?

People generally type a full sentence as a question:

Where can I find X

What Google returns is a listing of X thingys that are ONLY located in Maryland.