Search Results Page now have an interactive map showing all the stores

Example:　http://www.yellowhours.com/find/bar/in/los%20angeles/page1.html

When user hovers over the store links, the map will focus the relative place. When user hovers over the map, the map size will be doubled and when the marker is clicked, the basic info will be shown.

Advice is warmly welcome.

Nearby Search Feature added

Now you can search nearby businesses in a store page.

The feature includes related business nearby, popular business nearby, and a search input field where you can put anything you want to search.

Hope this feature will help you find out what you are looking for.

New Feature: find related stores links and nearby popular categories on store page

Though tag in a city links have been added in the store page, the related categories nearby (through tags) and popular categories ( through popular search terms) can be easily added to the store page and will great improve the usibility of the store page.

This feature will be added shortly.

Ideas: Meta Keywords and Meta Description

Though meta keywords and description play a less important role in nowadays’ search engine ranking algorithms, we still believe that concise and relevant keywords and compact useful description in the page metas are still very important in improving YellowHours’s quality.

Yesterday, we spent a good amount of time to improving metas of some modules and hope it will impact positively in the long run.

Good article: Effect of PageRank in crawling your sites by google crawlers

http://maplist.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/effect-of-pagerank-in-crawling-your-sites-by-google-crawlers/

Almost everybody knows PageRank plays a great role in determining your site’s position in google’s large webpage database, but less people have noticed that PageRank also determine how many pages or how fast the crawlers from google will index your pages.

Here is my own experience from MapList.Org. About a month ago, when maplist has a PageRank of 3 and some of the local sites, for example http://toronto.maplist.org, have 3 too, Google indexed about 400,000 pages.

Then, due to some reason, the PageRank dropped to 2 and now the pages for MapList in Google’s database has dropped to 40,000 and the number is still decreasing.

As for how to increase your PageRank, everybody has his own answer, but one of the most important one is to improve your site quality and so that more natural links will appear for your site.

YellowHours is still in the development phase

More features are about to be finished. So, YellowHours is still in the phase of development.

We are working hard to lauch it soon.

YellowHours.com’s blog live now

YellowHours has been live for a while and today we are happy to annouce that we will use http://yellowhours.wordpress.com as our office blog.