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!

To add your free business coupon just search for your business on CitySquares and once you find it, click it so you go to your business profile page. On the right side of the page you’ll see a blue box to Edit your listing for free. You’ll then be taken to a page where you can edit your business information. Keep in mind that you do need to have a username and password on CitySquares to do this.

Lastly, we encourage you to enter a coupon or discount that is redeemable. For example, something that says “Free hair coloring for first time customers when you bring this coupon with you!” This way your asking the consumer to bring the coupon with them and you’ll be able to see for yourself that the coupons are working!

Take full advantage of this and spread the word!

Please email us at help@citysquares.com if you have any questions.

How do you know you are getting targeted traffic? Website analytics.  Many small business owners really have no clue about what sort of traffic they are getting or even how to figure out what the numbers mean.  This post is meant to be a quick introduction to website analytics.

Most web hosting packages you will come with some sort of statistics. There are also programs or services you can purchase.  Probably the best free option right now is Google Analytics.   When looking at a web analytics program/service, you need to be able to answer the following questions:

* Who has been to your website?
* What were they looking for?
* Where did they come from?
* How long did they look at your content?
* Were they locals?

To answer some of these questions, you will need to understand the terms used in web analytics.  For a good list of terms used in analyics, please see Wikipedia .  Below are two terms that I try to point out to folks because they very important.

Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User – The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server or viewing pages within a defined time period. A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor’s computer, not the person, usually via cookie and/or IP+User Agent. Thus the same person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors.

Bounce Rate – The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.

The last point I want to make about web analytics is time.   Time will show trends and this is very valuable when understanding your traffic.  If your website is new, or you recently updated portions of the site, you will need to give it some time to see how that will effect your traffic. The more data points you get, the better informed you will be.

I want to encourage all small business owners to take a few minutes and take a look at your traffic. Can you figure out what is going on with your site?  It is not that hard, once you understand the basics.

Additional Articles:
Below are some excellent articles, written by fellow local search marketers about how analytics can help with your local search marketing campaigns.

• The Most Important Analytics In Local Search
• Using Analytics For Local Search Optimization
• Tracking Local search Traffic with Analytics