Find Buffalo Blog

Since I started blogging about FindBuffalo and other internet musings, my spotting around to other blogs has increased about 400% (very solid stat). I used to read a few blogs every now and then … and I still remember the first bog I came across, Mark Cuban’s BlogMaverick. I’ve found some other good ones over time, Gigaom had cred with me as I’m a big Business 2.0 fan.

So now I’m in deeper and I find myself consuming just blogs “on the rocks”. I’ll get on the laptop and just bounce from blog to blog, just running with whatever catches my eye. I don’t even dare mix in a plain website … no Yahoo or ESPN, no StarTrib or CSS Mania, just straight up blog. I can’t help myself and I don’t think I want to. I just want to soak up the knowledge, the angles, the purpose and shape of each post. So intoxicating. I’m too skitzo on what really energizes me right now but I’m sure I’ll find a way to give some shout outs to those that compel me to push ideas out. I know I could BlogRoll them, but it seems so empty to me not to attach why I deem them worthy of mention. I’ll figure out something … until then I’ll continue to enjoy in moderation or abusive amounts.

Thank you for indexing me last night sometime between 12:00am and 6:00am.  I have been waiting for you for days.  How did you finally reach me?  Was it a link from another site?  Was it the request for indexing I submitted to you?  Was it the PR (see post below) that came across your news desk?

It sure would be helpful if I knew how you found me.  Maybe you should consider sending me an email, educating me on this process. But the important thing is we are together now and you can start to know my every move and offering.  I do hope this relationship is a wonderful one.

p.s. - I know you and Yahoo aren’t exactly friends, but could you mention to her that I exist?

Thanks!

I’m a strong believer in PR and press releases. In FindBuffalo.com’s infancy it will be important to tap into key PR opportunities to generate branding, awareness and buzz for the site locally. One thing that was easy as well as a must was to write a press release about the launching of FindBuffalo.com.

As you can tell from reading my blog, an accomplished writer I am not. Writing an adequate press release is not rocket science if you follow some basic rules. There are a lot of PR advice sites out there, just search it. I also feel that if you have zero talent or time to produce this, then seek a pro to help you out. It is more than worth it.

I used to visit PRweb to distribute a press release online, but they have moved away from free services to only fee services so it led me to seek out another source for this. I came up with PR.com after a search and used their free distribution service, but I did pay a small fee to include a link in the release. I linked the text “Buffalo, Minnesota” in the opening sentence to FindBuffalo.com in order to generate a bit of SEO weight. Click here to read the press release. The service also secured that the release would appear on Google News. Click here for Google News result display

In addition to seeking out ways to get PR, I hope that the site creates some opportunities by it’s unique offering and perceived value.

While I await being indexed I’ve poked into a few search terms and what currently shows as results. When I search Google for: pizza buffalo, mn the first three results from Google Local are:

Local results for pizza near Buffalo, MN 55313
	Domino’s Pizza - 0.9 miles N - 96 14th St NE - (763) 682-3830 Pizza Hut - 1.8 miles N - 1101 Highway 25 N - (763) 682-2592 Buffalo Superamerica Inc - 0.9 miles E - 301 10th Ave S - (763) 682-5541

This is interesting because there are also 3 other pizza places in Buffalo, but they somehow lose out to Super America, a gas station with a pizza shop in it. I’m not sure if the local results are limited to 3 displaying, or how they determine/weight which 3 are displayed, but I would think Bucks Pizza, Pappa Murphy’s or Ageno’s Pizza would be more relevant for searchers. This is a good example of when a company should use a service like LocalMN to bolster their local search presence and results in Google, Yahoo, Ask and others. You’d better believe that the importance of this local search service and how it can convert searchers to customers is extremely important.

The first organic result is a page on Career Builder for Pizza Hut and a management opening in Buffalo. The next 10 results are all yellow page or directory results. I would think Domino’s or Pizza Hut, who both offer online ordering would find a way to tweak their SEO to have a local presence at this level of search. But, they obviously don’t. As soon as I get indexed this will be one of my goals, to get the top ranking for pizza listings in Buffalo and to also sell a PLUS listing to each of them and try to get those pages on page one.

As with all projects the second you launch them it seems as if you missed things all over the place. Maybe that is just me and speaks to my BETA testing skills. I created a “Hot 5″ list of things that need to be corrected, tweaked and looking into and I think I’ll keep that as a weekly thing. If things move along and more items are shored up then I can extend it to be a monthly list. Nothing life threatening though …

The other piece here is waiting to get indexed. If this blog had generated some readers this is where I would ask for your 2 cents. Since it will be me reading this a few times to make sure I have no major errors in spelling … I can’t answer my own question. I have 2 sites linking to my home page right now so hopefully Google and Yahoo will crawl one of those and end up here. I submitted to the big dogs of search so hopefully they will come soon. I feel like I’m sitting on hold with some 800 support service, waiting to exist.

Well, after about 8 months of planning and work FindBuffalo.com is viewable to the world. This is a 2 man, grass roots project … and hopefully we’ll find a volunteer or two along the way. The next month or so to end 2006 will be spent working out the bugs, putting good ideas to work and getting things ship-shape. The site is built on the Site Management Console from Intrcomm Technology and it is a great hosted CMS. I have worked with the SMC for 5 years now and truly believe in it’s abilities, flexibility, scalability and most of all, ease of use. My job (FindBuffalo.com is a hobby) utilizes this system to build our websites and it services everything from banking sites to e-commerce.

Not a soul knows about this site so we will be building a brand and user following from nothing. I’m extremely interested to see how some of the SEO tactics I’ve put together perform. I’m sure I’ll be blogging about that plenty. Thats enough for post number one, on day number one. Cheers to the future.

Site Users on 12.7.06: ZERO
Sites linking to FindBuffalo.com: 2