The last few days if you used Google to search for "Fort Smith Cars" you wouldn't find Smith Chevrolet, Randall Ford, Breeden Dodge, J Pauley Toyota, Bill White Auto, or even Jim Ray Nissan. If you searched for "Fort Smith Cars" you would find us Kirkham Systems! No, we haven't gone into the car business, I just mentioned the word car once in a post about a week or two ago and because these car lots haven't had their websites developed correctly and marketed by a company such as ourselves they don't show up on search engines. They are completely invisible to Google. In fact, I'm guessing that after this post goes up we will again show up close to the top for Fort Smith Cars. If you own a car dealership then we already know you don't show up on Google, so you need to call us today so we can redesign your website and help your customers find you. Web marketing consultations are free so call us at (479)478-3032 for an appointment.

(Cross posted from my personal blog)

A while back, I wrote about what I'm calling the Local Web. The Local Web, in my mind, is a group (an infinite number of groups are possible) which arrange their interconnectedness by sharing a geographical point of reference, traditionally Metropolitican Statistical Areas, or MSAs. The Local Web is already built in many of the larger cities, with directories and vertical search engines to allow you to search for stuff in major metropolitan areas, but a good percentage if not the majority of Americans live outside of a major metropolitan area. The connected netizens from those areas are being largely overlooked by current major initiatives to create localized web experiences.

I'm starting an experiment in a town that should be the perfect size. My hometown is Fort Smith, Arkansas, a town of about 80,000 with about a quarter million in the MSA. There are billions of dollars of business done every year here, and many companies here ship worldwide. However, for doing business in town, most people still reach for the phone book. The reason for this, of course, is because you can spend days Googling around for information about Fort Smith businesses without finding much but spam sites. No one in this town has made a concerted effort to make sure things are easily found on the web about businesses they'd like to do business with.