One of the web conversations that is most important to any SMB (or large business for that matter) is the control and exchange of information with current and potential customers and prospects.  But before you can engage in that conversation, they have to find you.  And that's getting harder and harder to ensure.  With a million web pages being added to the Internet daily (okay...I made that number up, but I bet it's not far off), figuring out how your customers might find your needle in an infinite haystack is getting harder and harder.

This is the reason so many people invest in paid search (read:  why Google employees drive Ferraris), but even more important to many SMBs than broad paid search is Local Search.  Here is a good article on how to make the most of Local Search:  http://www.imediaconnection.com/Newsletter/15841.asp

A lot of the 10 tips are consistent with general best practices for SEO optimization (e.g. - be relevant) but I also think there is some good meat around recommendations like 'get local links'.  We all know how important links (or backlinks) are in general for SEO, and we also generally understand that the significance of the site linking to me determines how much weighting that link receives in evaluating my site for a potential search result.  The concept of local links not only adds to my general backlink count (not a bad thing), but I'm sure the Google Spiders and algorithms include (or are soon to include) extra special weighting for a local backlink when delivering results for local search.  So you might have a great backlink from www.food.com if you are a local eatery in Phoenix, but eventually a link or two from a neighborhood paper website (even with its small reach) could count for more.  It's like comparing Consumer Reports to Angie's List (www.angieslist.com).  I'll take the review on Angie's List again and again, and the search engines realize that.

More and more, small business websites need to migrate to services that enable these local search results.  That's why products like BT Tradespace (www.bttradespace.com) that are built with the concepts of local communities, local search, ratings/referrals, etc. baked in may be the next form of how search starts.  As the results from a Yellow Pages search get closer to what I might expect from Google, or perhaps get better because of the local specificity, then maybe the war for eyeballs switches back to the big yellow book (except online).