The minute you hear the scampering of paws across the  CitySquares’ office floor and the sound of excited panting, you know that the CitySquares canine entertainment is about to begin.

Elmer is CitySquares’ co-founder Ben Saren’s 15-month old dog and of course an essential part of the CitySquares’ team – he comes to work every day and keeps us all entertained with his tail-chasing, begging for food, and random excitability.

Because Elmer is always around the office, we thought it would be great to put his adorable mug at the forefront of a new weekly blog entry titled “Elmer’s Weekly Small Business Tip.” These ideas will give neighborhood businesses insight into what they can do to promote and market their businesses every day.

We also want our readers to get to know the CitySquares team and its dynamics. How better to start doing so than by introducing Elmer, the office dog?

Elmer’s Weekly Small Business Tip

Nov 19, 2009

Include a CitySquares Badge on your website so your website visitors can see that you’re on CitySquares and can check out your reviews and other information that might not be on your website. Also, when you add a badge that links to your profile on CitySquares.com, you’re helping your overall search engine optimization. Search engines love links – and links to and from your website and to/from your CitySquares profile is good for your online presence.

Just copy and paste the following HTML code into your website site and remember to personalize both the business name and city within the code.

Small Badge HTML Code

The code below, underneath the images, is what you want to copy and paste into your website’s HTML. The red text is the code you want to customize with the URL of your page on CitySquares and with your city.

<!– Begin CitySquares.com Membership Badge –><br />

<a href=”[URL of your CitySquares profile, including http://]” target=”_blank”><br />

<img src=”http://badges.citysquares.com/smbadge.gif” alt=”[your business name, City] on CitySquares” border=”0″ /><br />

</a><br />

Large Badge HTML Code

The code below, underneath the large badge, is what you want to copy and paste into your website’s HTML. The red text is the code you want to customize with the URL of your page on CitySquares and with your city.

<!– Begin CitySquares.com Membership Badge –><br />

<a href=”[URL of your CitySquares profile, including http://]target=”_blank”><br />

<img src=”http://badges.citysquares.com/badge.gif” alt=“[your business name, City] on CitySquares” border=”0″ /><br />

</a><br />

And that’s it! Once you do that you’ll have a fancy shmancy new badge on your website that links to your profile on CitySquares, and watch the search engines pick that up and give both your own website and your CitySquares profile higher ranking.

If you have any questions about this, just give Elmer a call at 877-61-LOCAL!

]]> http://blog.citysquares.com/2009/11/19/elmers-local-business-tips-nov-19-2009/feed/ 1 http://blog.citysquares.com/2009/11/19/elmers-local-business-tips-nov-19-2009/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/citysquares/~3/VbClXn8Hp7I/ http://blog.citysquares.com/2009/11/12/the-beginning-of-the-citysquares-community-scrapbook/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:45:11 +0000 Marissa Green http://blog.citysquares.com/?p=859

Everyday, the CitySquares team recognizes each local business’ and website user’s contribution to the overall CitySquares community.

We are working to create an online CitySquares Community Scrapbook where we will highlight one local business per week on our Facebook Fan Page. These are businesses that people have recently shown interest in and wrote positive reviews on the specific company’s profile.

We want to help spread the word about local businesses that are helping their neighborhoods by providing the services and products they do and creating an enjoyable experience for their customers and the people in their communities.

Included in the scrapbook is a link to the company’s profile, how the company views their impact on their community and a picture showing the products and services the business offers their neighborhood.

A big part of this scrapbook process will be fans tagging themselves in the photo your business provides to show they have visited your business before. We will also ask them to write a comment if your business’ products or services had a big impact on them or their local community.

We would love your input about this idea and suggestions of local CitySquares’ businesses that should be highlighted. If you are a local business and have a CitySquares’ profile that you would like to be featured, you should contact Marissa to receive further details.

The CitySquares’ Team is excited to see the Scrapbook grow each week and continue to show how much local businesses have become essential parts of communities across the nation.

Become a part of the CitySquares family and sign-up today!

Clevergreen is a professional eco-friendly dry cleaners that added the drop box option to make it easier for T-riders who are already helping the environment by taking the train everyday. The drop box is located by the garage at Station Landing in Wellington Circle.

CitySquares’ street team consisted of 3 members; Elcin Cetin, Amanda Guida and Marissa Green who gave out  coupons to local Medford residents. Many community members seemed really interested in the idea of Clevergreen and exciting about CitySquares, which of  course was inspiring to the optimistic spirits of the street team!

CitySquares is always excited to help local businesses get as much awareness in their community’s as possible. Street teaming is just another way we are working to make that happen.

CitySquares is looking to fill a few open positions. There are two in particular that we’re

most eager to fill. Do you know anyone for these roles? If you do, and we hire them, we’ll pay you a $500 referral fee! Check them out…

National Ad Sales Executive
ETL Engineer

October 16, 2009 marked the fourth year for CitySquares.com, a reflective milestone for co-founders Ben Saren and Bob Leland who recognize the successes and growth of CitySquares.com since its launch in 2005. CitySquares.com began as a small website with information about local businesses in seven Boston area neighborhoods to what is now a national hyperlocal resource with over 14 million businesses, tens of thousands of users, and rapidly growing traffic. Today, the CitySquares team continues the vision these two founders have spent the last four years expanding on; to ensure that neighborhood businesses get the attention they deserve.

The CitySquares.com website was founded with business profiles from only a few communities in the Boston Area. As of March 2009, CitySquares expanded across the nation and today there are over 14 million businesses on our site with over 18,000 written reviews from website users, and growing fast.

Co-founder Ben Saren says, “We both originally had a vision of helping small businesses get online exposure in a hyper-local context and now it’s not just a vision, it’s a reality.”

A little over four years ago, October 13, 2005, the CitySquares.com launch party was held in Davis Square, Somerville, MA.

There were performers from the Deborah Mason School of Dance, face painting and other activities for members of the local Davis Square community. The neighborhood warmly welcomed CitySquares into their neighborhood and lives. This assistance and the many other contributions people have made since day one for CitySquares have not gone unnoticed by either founder. Some of the first businesses to be a part of the CitySquares family include The Square Nail Studio, Massage Therapy Works and Wedgewood-Crane & Connolly Insurance Agency.

Ben Saren, co-founder and CEO, says, “The exciting thing about being a part of CitySquares is the culture, mission and approach. Everyone who has been and is a part of CitySquares helped us get to this point. I want extend a huge thank you to all of them.”

Along with the development of CitySquares, the long-lasting friendship between co-founders Bob and Ben is a model relationship for all business duos.  Bob says, “While so much has changed over the past four years, and we’ve been through so many highs and lows, our vision is being realized. We’ve come so far as a business, as a company, and Ben and I have grown so much as entrepreneurs and friends.”

Both founders are humbled by this milestone and how much CitySquares has grown over the past four years.  They are looking forward to many more years of helping small businesses get exposure, and attract the interest of their local communities and consumers.

Special thanks to Justin, Kim, Michael, and Amber, who continue to fight the good battle on behalf of Local Search and on behalf of small businesses.

Happy 4^th Anniversary CitySquares.com!

Full Time Positions

• Contract Web Developer
• Account Managers
• Contract MySQL DBA/ETL

Internships and Other Opportunities

• Marketing Intern
• QA Intern
• SEO Internship
• Graphic Design Intern
• Referral Agents

If you’re interested in any of these positions, please email us as specified in the job postings. All our jobs can be seen on our Jobs page. Please do not call us. If you’re a recruiter or headhunter, no offense but please don’t contact us. We already work with a couple of firms that we’re happy with. So thanks but no thanks!

Here’s how to get started:

Let’s say you want to add a list of the restaurants in Boston’s Back Bay to your website. All you’d need to do is go to that page on CitySquares and click the Get this Feed button. Once you click that you’ll be able to copy it into your clipboard and do any one of the following:

1. Use Your Blog Platform: If you use a blogging platform like Wordpress or something similar, you should be able to add a Feed Widget to your sidebar. If you can do that, just paste the feed link into that widget. Your blog’s CSS will take care of the formatting for the feed and control how it’s displayed.
2. Get a Free Widget: If you’d like to use a third party RSS widget, there’s a bunch of options out there. One in particular at SpringWidgets is pretty good and its free, but there’s others freely available. Just Google for RSS widgets and you should get plenty of options. Once you find the widget you like, enter the feed link provided to you on CitySquares.com, then grab the snippet of code provided by the widget, and drop it into your website code.
3. Build it Yourself: If you’re a developer or you know what you’re doing, you can get a lot fancier, and you can control the look and styles for the feed on your website. Just grab the RSS feed link and have at it!
4. Subscribe: If you’re not looking to do something like this on your website, but instead you want to just subscribe to one of these feeds, that’s quite simple too. All you need is an RSS reader like any of the free ones out there.

The lists of businesses in these feeds are set up to rotate quite regularly, basically whenever business content is updated on our site, it’ll update in the feeds. This way you get a fresh list of businesses on your site, as businesses are added or edited on CitySquares.com. And based on how you choose to integrate these feeds into your site, you can choose to only display a list of businesses, or a list with verbose information about them. It’s up to you! For an example, look on the right side of this page for a list of South End, Boston Restaurants, where CitySquares is headquartered.

This is just the first implementation of RSS feeds for publishers and we’re interested in your feedback before we kick it up a notch. Please feel free to report any troubles, or submit your comments, suggestions, etc., below.

Thanks and happy feeding!

To get started, just click on the blue Facebook Connect button that’s at the top of every page on CitySquares.com. The pages that follow are very straight-forward, and within just a minute or two you’ll be good to go.

While implementing Facebook Connect we were able to effectively re-engineer the user profiling system that’s native to the CitySquares website (built on Drupal). This is a good thing, because it will allow us to start doing much fancier things. It opens the door to a more robust Facebook integration, as well as Twitter and soon much more.

The Local Web and the Social Web are related. OK they’re not sisters, but they’re definitely cousins. The now and the future of local will see much more social features and functionalities. Some of the things we’re working on now, and plan on launching shortly, include a more robust Facebook Connect integration so that, for example, when you leave a review on CitySquares.com for a local business, your Facebook wall will be updated with something like a snippet of the review and a link to it on CitySquares.com. Same for when you give a business a star rating, or even if you contribute content in other ways, like adding news, an event, or useful information about your community and neighborhood. We’ll also allow businesses to create fan pages through their CitySquares account.

We’re also going to be rolling out a Twitter integration shortly, for both users and for businesses. There’s a whole strategy we’re going to evolve that into for community and neighborhood pages, to effectively create a waterfall of real-time locally relevant information that both pulls content in, and distributes content out. I know that sounds a little too conceptual, but hang in there – you’ll see what we mean very soon.

We hope you like what we’re doing! Stay tuned, there’s a whole bunch more coming soon. We welcome your feedback and suggestions, feel free to leave your comments below.

Throughout 2009 scores of people will rate businesses on CitySquares.com and we invite you to rate your favorite destinations! Each season there will be a different All Star campaign, with Beauty & Wellness being the first, Dining & Entertainment being the second and Shopping starting in October.

Whether it’s the bicycle shop who helped you find some new wheels, or that local clothing retailer around the corner who had the perfect jacket, this is your chance to say thanks and give them some recognition. All Star winners will be picked according to your votes, there are no editorial picks. And hey, while you’re at it, why not share your experiences with these businesses as well? To add your review simply create a free CitySquares.com user account and add as many reviews as you’d like.

Thank you for supporting your local community on CitySquares.com!

The Health & Wellness Top 10 are as follows!

• Clevergreen Cleaners – Best Dry Cleaning & Overall All Star winner! This is their second year in a row!
• Unique Verve - Best Massage
  
• 379 Club – Best Barbershop
  
• State Street Barbers – Best Barbershop (runner up)
  
• Satin Wellness Personal Training – Best Personal Fitness
  
• Sain Visage Skin Care – Best Facials (runner up)
  
• Sole Tanning – Best Tanning Salon
  
• Indulge Day Spa – Best Day Spa
  
• Darque Tan – Best Tanning Salon (runner up)
  
• Stingray Tattoo – Best Tattoos
  

Congratulations to all the winners! Be on the look out for their All Star Winner decals in their windows and awards on their walls!

Coming up next… the CitySquares Dining and Entertainment All Stars… announced very shortly!