Local businesses online should be looking towards getting hyper-local for discovery of content. This a a brief overview of how this can be achieved.

Not much has changed in the grand scheme of the internet over the past 15 years, one thing is for certain, content has always been the steadfast diet of the search engines. But your visitors do not come purely because you wrote one single enigmatic piece of literary genious about your product.

Over the years I have managed campaigns where there have been tens of thousands of pages right down to single page websites. Both have the same goals, get eyes in front of that content. Buying eyes are the better of the two. Finding those buying eyes is the true unlocking mechanism to the conversions we all desire.

In recent months Google introduced the new version of Place Pages which are now readily available among most of the searches we undertake. To begin with they were geographical searches, but within the space of a week or so more generic keywords and phrases began to trigger Place Page entries within the organic results.

This has opened up brand new opportunities for all businesses, while your competition is still figuring out how to even get a place page you will already have completed yours and you will be a good way through building citations via your customers in locally focussed directories.

SEO in 2011 in my humble opinion will be the year for local SEO, an opportunity for businesses of all sizes to take advantage of what I view to be a very strong indication from Google that resources should be used in a good proportion to finding YOUR local customers.

I have been connecting more and more with businesses local to me and over the coming months I will be an even earlier riser than normal and getting myself along to meet and greet great local business owners with a view to offering my services.

In keeping with “pretend to be a time traveller day” I thought I would unleash this power on the SEO community to see what the future may hold or indeed even the past.

So what do you see?

This is not a “the future of SEO” post, it is just a fun look at probably near impossibilities for our industry.

I should probably give a few examples to get that mind of yours going shouldn`t I? ok.

I travelled to the future 2022 (no I am not in Qatar watching the World Cup, although the stadiums look nice in concept) I am in fact sat in Danny Sullivans office. He`s the new head of the Web Spam team because Matt Cutts is now living off affiliate links on his site (Danny changed the rules so that you can link to anybody without ranking reprisals).

Danny is playing with the newest gadget sent to him via a contact on PLitter (Twitter merged with LinkedIn to produce a true social networking platform where privacy was no issue and all the links were followed). Danny flips this new gadget around, its a iPad v22 which actually plays flash, the kind of flash that is easily indexed in all of G`s SERP`s.

Leave your time travelling SEO thoughts in the comments section below.

Warning: I might actually tweet your responses

Trying to stay on top of all of the changes Google introduce is no easy task, some are obvious, some are not so obvious and some need a little help from your friends.

One recent change had me scratching my head for quite a while, I could not find any resources pointing to the how or even the reasoning behind it. But localized SERP`s where it physically brings your postcode/zip code into the search, even giving the option to “set your location”

Simply put Googles ability to serve up such personalized search results has to have a starting point and I needed to know where the origin of it is. Signed in or even out of Google which of Googles products could be sending geographical information back to their datacentres beyond just my IP address?

I looked through every product I was signed up to or gave permissions to through my dashboard and none of which gave any indication beyond my Adsense account which is the only place that I suspect Google of knowing my physical address which is tied directly to any one of their products.

One friend over in the SEO Dojo suggested that it may come from using twitter on a GPS enabled device, I have actualy tweeted from a PSP and iPod and even my Blackberry, none of which were recognised by twitters mapping functions. So the paranoia continued.

Google Toolbar I hear you say?

Nope I have never had the toolbar installed on this machine.

I asked myself a few questions;

How is Google doing this?

Where does my search begin?

Then thanks again to the ever giving SEO Dojo it was pointed out to me that Google is the biggest funder of Firefox, then it occurred to me, surely it can`t be that easy can it?

If you are a Firefox user the chances are you will be using that search box developed right into the browser itself where Google is the default search

So into the about:config I ventured, I have only been into there on a handful of occasions and I would not recommend it if you do not know what you are doing.

Entering into this browser config file I had one thing in mind, I have to be looking for geo signals for the browser, so I continued to scroll through the list until I found a few of interest and sure enough there they were. You can filter these out yourself by simply typing “geo” into the filter.

“geo.enabled;true” & “geo.wifi.uri;https://www.google.com/loc/json” were the 2 that immediately stood out. and going back to the beginning of this post, “surely it can`t be that easy” can it?

All I have to do is change the string to false and thats it?

I would love to hear more from Browser geeks out there! Is this really the starting block for personalized search?

Update: 29/07/2011

A quick update to add that I had noticed a short fix to cleaning the personalized results.

From the command line (start>run>cmd) enter IPCONFIG /FLUSHDNS (not case sensitive). This will clear your personalisation and present you with clean SERPs when manually rank checking.