Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Google Local Business Center

Small Business Tech Notes

Google is moving into town.

Google is in the process of creating a local business center. This is the Beta right now so getting your listing into place will put you on the ground floor. The local business center will be essentially the online yellow pages Google style. It's free. It's secure and you get to control the content. When you sign up to have your business placed in the local business center you are able to place a description of your business a couple of sentences long. This information is not placed on Google until you enter you PIN number which Google will snail mail to you. After you enter the PIN your free listing will be placed. You'll need the PIN to change any information about your business on Google in the future.

I've seen free listings on Internet search engines before but I've never seen one with built-in security. As usual Google is doing it right. If the Local Business Center turns out to be half the success that the Google search engine is then you'll want to be listed.

Here the link to get started:
http://local.google.com/lochp

Look at the bottom of the page for the information for Business Owners link and follow it to place your listing.