Everyman IT

I just received an email from Google today touting their new “Google Tags”. Basically this is a service where you seem to pay $25 per month (Don’t quote me on this.  Their pricing scheme isn’t well defined.) to add a bit of bling to your Google Places account.

Google Places is a wonderful FREE tool from Google that allows you to add your business to their database.  You tell them your address, services, hours of operation and such and they use this data to try to narrow down local results for people doing searches.  If you have a brick and mortar business you NEED to setup a Google Places account today! It’s simply effective, free advertising.

What Google Tags does is when the local search results pop up you get a little yellow tag and highlighted offer.

After doing a number of searches I can’t honestly say that it really makes a particular result POP out, but it may be enough to direct some traffic your way.  If it really does only cost $25 per month, AND your site already appears on page 1 or 2 of the local listings I would drop the money on it.  If your page shows up on page 3+ of the local listings I wouldn’t bother because frankly no matter how much it POP’s no one is going to see it…

Here’s a link to Google Tags.  They currently (9/9/10) have a 30 day free trial: http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?answer=185057