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To see who is marketing locally with Web do this search
Williamstown + directory
The plus sign means that bot terms will be present. Of course put in name of your own suburb!
For many suburbs you will find some sort of directory or local portal, maybe even several.
The first and obvious thing to do is to make sure your business is in that directory. But you can do a bit more as well. Check out your competitors.
Look out for possible partners for link exchanges.
For example if you have an accommodation business you can swap links with nearby attractions or restaurants. If you have a limousine service you could link up with florists or others serving wedding industry.
The search engines are starting to introduce technology to facilitate local searches, but people are starting to do this already. You can localise your search by using something like 'Williamstown + florists' as your search term. But soon we will all be using Google like an online Yellow Pages.
Darby Higgs is editor of OzArticles which is dedicated to increasing the use of Australian written content on the Internet. It does this by encouraging Australian writers, providing a clearinghouse of articles for republishing on the web, and by encouraging webmasters and ezine editors to use Australian articles. See http://www.ozarticles.com