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Out of websites on the internet, Facebook is the number 2 site, outpacing Yahoo for the prized spot behind Google. Facebook just recently announced a new feature, one we all knew was coming, called Facebook Places, something Facebook hopes can take a social media shot at Google’s Places, (aka: maps, formerly called Local Business Listings. Not to be confused with Google Earth.) Facebook has already planned to compete with Wikipedia on the meaning of words and information on branded terms.

A few years ago local directories owned most of the local search share, mostly do to strong SEO and traffic from traditional print users shifting to digital and remaining loyal to the telephone companies who sent phone books to their homes. Then Google and other search engines started displaying map results, the internet yellow page companies fought back by offering maps, which was an obvious move considering that most folks wanted to find the products and service providers nearest them. Yet slowly the web traffic monopolies shifted away from the yellow pages publishers. No longer do you see phone book results from just sites like YellowPages.com, Switchboard.com, SuperPages.com, or Local.com at the top organic (natural) results of major search engines.

That bring us to Today. The biggest change in local search since Google Maps. Facebook is incorporating check-ins like FourSquare and Gowalla, likely going to include group buying like Groupon, and with ownership of the ratings and review space….

Side note: The trouble with ratings and reviews has always been authenticity and trust. Do we trust reviews. How can we influence positive real and authoritative reviews? Facebook’s “Like” button fixes the trust issue. I believe Facebook will OWN reviews. It will also continue to own the social space. Many sites and brands have more traffic to Facebook fan pages than to their actual websites.

Facebook is set to dominate local search. Will it be a monopoly like the Bell Yellow Pages of yesteryear? Most likely. How do businesses prepare?

Couple suggestions:
-Take a tour of Facebook
-Claim your Facebook (and Google) Place
-Start a blog about your product or service
-Meet with a local search expert and social media marketing consultant.
-Optimize your existing Facebook business profile before the conversion to Facebook Places
-Share your Facebook favorites (your business page) as a suggestion to friends and family. When you get 25 likes you can add a custom url to your page.
- and last, but certainly not least, start interacting with the community

Facebook will be the new yellowpages, just wait and see.

With everyone want to rank in the SERP’s and still not really spending a lot of time managing their Word Press site. So I put together a list of plugins that can help you save a little time as you setup and manage your site. They help with ideas, automation, and distribution of your pages and post.

#1 Akismet

Akismet comes installed default with your WordPress install. This is one of the best time savers. You will need to go to WordPress.com and sign up for an account to get a key for Akismet. Once you install you key it will filter all the comments and block all comment spammers. This saves me a lot of time on all of my sites. They more popular your site, the more spammers are going to hit your site.

#2 All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO will let you edit the Title, Description, and Keywords for each Post or Page. You can also set the default settings so the it will pull the keywords from the Categories and Tags that the post has.

#3 Facebook Like Button Plugin

You need to get everyone involved on your site. Why not get people to say that they Like your site. This plugin puts a Facebook Like Button under each Page and Post. Its about time to tie some Social Media into your site!

#4 Google Analytics Dashboard

This is more of a convenience plugin for me. I like to login check my stats and see where people are coming from, what keywords they use to hit my site, and then make a new post using those keywords. This one plugin saves me about 45 minutes a day.

#5 Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin is sweet! It will auto create a sitemap for you every time you create a new post or page. It then notifies Google, Yahoo(if you have a key), Ask, and Bing. This saves me about 10 minutes every time I make a post.

#6 Scribe

Scribe SEO helps you check to see what your posts main keyword phrase is for your post or page. It also works with All in One SEO to get you the best on page optimization that you can get. It rates everything based on a point system.

#7 Send E-mail

I mainly use this to save me some time creating my contact page. Create a page and put [ contact - form ] (without spaces) on that page and BAM now you have a contact form. It will send the emails to the author of the page. So you could get real crazy a put that one every author page so they can get them their own emails.

#8 Sexy Bookmarks

Now I know some of you are like me and your mind went straight to the gutter, but this is not one of those type of plugins. This creates the really nice Social Media Bookmark buttons that you see at the bottom of this and every post here on smbSEO.com.

#9 Simple Tags

This one plugin is very multifunctional! First thing that I use it for is Simple Tag creation when I do a new post. It will check to see what tags you have used or will see what good tags you could have in your post and checks them on Yahoo. Second thing I use it for is related post. Every blog should have a Related Posts section at the end of the post. This helps keep people on your site! They are already looking for something to do, go ahead and give them their next move.

#10 Twitter Tools

This one is optional. I use it on client sites for one reason and one reason only. I want each blog post to automatically post to their Twitter account. This is just a time saver for me.