Own a small business? Want more customers? It’s easy, fast and very inexpensive.

Things that you should have ready:

#1: accurate, current information on your business. Much of the data online about local businesses comes from phone books. The phone books are either scanned and optical character recognition (OCR) used to read it or the pages are physically or via a scan to low-wage parts of the world. There the pages are keypunched into a computer. Even with a second or third person keypunching the same data and doing comparisions to catch errors, errors still creep in. The bigger your business, the more likely this is to happen.

Even with a small business, it’s a good habit to check that your name is exactly the way you want, the categories are appropriate and the phone numbers and addresses are correct. This isn’t very exciting, so having the information in front of you is a good way to make sure you do it at each site.

#2: a website. I strongly, strongly, strongly encourage you to get a domain name if you don’t have one already. We now have “local number portability” for cell phones and land lines. We’ve had toll-free number portability for a long time. Those mean if you can get serious savings with another provider or having serious service issues with your current provider, you can move. Having an address at any provider, like CitySearch or Yahoo, means that you’re locked-in. You do NOT want this. You want people to be able to come to your domain and add that to their bookmarks or address book.

The website doesn’t have to be fancy. You want your name, address, hours of operation and a couple of pictures. A little information on your business - see #5. You also want to put your email address online. More on that in #3.

#3: You need an email address with good anti-spam measures. From personal experience, Hotmail and Gmail are both very good. I find Hotmail more familiar with how I’m used to working (folders, delete messages) but it’s a little clunky compared to Gmail. The ads are more intrusive and they have more steps to do things so they can show more ads.

Some sites will conceal your email address completely. A prospective customer would have to click on a form to send you email. Spiders used by spammers won’t be able to use these addresses at all - the address is never shown to the customer. Some sites will conceal it from people with a bit of javascript so that they can register a keyclick. For the directory, this is useful information. We show a page on tires 100 times, which links do people click on? But the spiders don’t do javascript and so they see the address in the clear. And other sites just publish your email address.

So rather than worrying about doing tricky things on your website to hide your email address, figure that the bad guys, the spammers, are going to get it. Make it as easy as possible for the good guys - your customers - to talk to you. So don’t use “jdeibele(at)mypages.com” or post it as an image or whatever. Just put “jdeibele@mypages.com” out there.

#4: Have 1-3 pictures of your business that you like. Post them wherever you can. People like to see pictures of your business. Or of you. Or happy customers. Or “before” and “after” pictures of a job you’re particularly pleased with.

#5: Description of your business. This is another thing that’s good to have written out. A history about your business would be nice - who are you? How’d you get into this line of business? The more detail you can give, the better. But having 2 or 3 paragraphs to start with is a big help.

Tomorrow, we start with the first site to put this information.

Note: This is the first article in a series of articles on how to promote your local business. If you’d like to add information or have me explain in more detail, please contact me. I think you can find my email address.

OK, probably more people noticed that Google was offline today than the fact that we had an issue, too.

Completely different issue than what they had. But I can’t tell you how embarrassing it is to not be answering for searches.

In a previous life, I ran an ISP. And I found a lot of our system administrators and network administrators lept at the chance of being the in-house guy for a manufacturing company or whatever. And a lot of it was due to the lower levels of stress. If you work at a 9-5 place, well, it doesn’t matter so much that there’s a glitch with mail. But if you’re an ISP, it really matters.

There are a lot of companies that might as well turn off their router about 6:15PM on a Friday. And it’s a lot less stressful working at those kinds of places.

It also seems like a lot less fun.

If you’re in a 24×7 environment, the stress level is higher. But so is the feeling of accomplishment.

Our issue today was with one of our software suppliers. We’re going to work things out but it’s annoying to think about the kind of hardware redundancy we’ve implemented but how someone else’s problems can still cause us grief.

Occasionally somebody will ask me where our data comes from. Unfortunately it’s usually because they’re unhappy with seeing an old phone number and/or address visible on our pages.

We license our data from a company that compiles thousands of phone books into one big database. “Compiles” means that they have the phonebooks keypunched a listing at a time by people somewhere overseas.

Now, you might expect this data to be highly accurate. And to be fair, it is. But it’s also definitely not perfect. Given that phone books are out of date even before they’re published, we suffer from a lag time as new businesses are added or businesses that have gone out of business are eventually dropped.

Complicating matters (we think) is the “multiple phone books covering one area”. Say Verizon and Dex cover the same area. Well, we end up with 2 similar copies of a lot of data. Unfortunately, they’re not quite identical. And we don’t know which one is most correct.

We started out knocking out businesses with the same phone number and address. Say a business was named after its foudner. So we had “John Doe Enterprises” and “Doe John Enterprises”. So we started inactivating redundant addresses. We thought. But all of a sudden many dentists and doctors and attorneys disappeared. So we’ve come back the other way, which is to include all of the records we know about.

That’s not a great solution but it works. If we could have people in the loop, they’d be able to tell that “John Doe Inc” was basically the same as “John Doe Corporation” and they were both the same as “Doe John Inc”. People could see what was going on. But any program that we wrote in a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost was not able to say “hey, XYZ Inc. is within 25 miles of XYZ corp. Maybe they’re the same company even though they have different addresses.”

One of the changes that we made today was to expand the search radius from 10 miles to 25 miles. It’s interesting dealing with the entire US. We started out with 20 and reduced to 10 miles because it made life easier for our servers. A 10×10 square rounded off is about 100 miles. A 20×20 square is 400 miles and potentially 4 times as many results.

Obviously it matters a lot if you’re in Manhattan or 15 miles away from Manhattan. If you’re in Manhattan, adding more isn’t going to make that much difference for “attorneys”. You’ve already got tens of thousands. If you’re 20 miles upstate, changing the radius could make a lot of difference.

Living in Portland, Oregon has lots of advantages. But one disadvantage is thinking of cities as relatively small. We’ve gotten some email from people who live in San Diego or Houston who helped us realize that we needed to go to a larger radius by default.

We are planning on letting you control the radius, the number of items on the page, etc. But doing so would automatically make you a “power MyPages.com user”. We’re still working on making the experience as good as possible for the average person who finds our site. And while we’ve made a lot of progress, we’ve still got a ways to go.

Yesterday I talked about one benefit of updating your information on our site: you zoom to the front of the category for your city. Even if your name starts with Z. Even if you’re not the closest business to downtown.

Again, we are doing this primarily for the benefit of our users. When I go to the yellow pages, the hardest part is knowing where to start. So we present the businesses we have the most information on first. To be at the front, a business has said something about itself or a reviewer has. That’s more info than name, address and phone number. That helps people make the best decisions.

Because our pages are getting found more and more by Google, Yahoo!, MSN and so on, they’re using our pages to find other sites. Some of the search engines dig deeply and some don’t. So getting on page 1 means that more search engines find you. Which means that more people will find your site in Google directly, without needing to go through MyPages.com.

Now, obviously, we’d love it if every search for a local business went through us. But that’s not reality. By helping you get your website found, you’ll want to keep your info on MyPages.com up-to-date.

Now would be a good time to go over to List Your Business