The beginning of this month saw Yahoo’s 15th birthday. While for many businesses 15 is not an advanced age, on the Internet it makes you one of the elders.

Back when Yahoo started, search engines were not a common concept, and, indeed, only a small percentage of the population was going online at all. It’s inspiring to think that this global, million-dollar company was started by two young graduates who happened to see a need. It’s a pattern that we’ve seen over and over again, as the Internet starts enabling Joe Normal to make it big, with nothing more than a rock-solid idea.

Yes, many companies fall by the wayside, but as we begin to understand this manmade phenomenon, the Internet, we also learn more about how to use it to succeed. Let’s take a moment to salute Yahoo, and to hope that our own small businesses might one day match this behemoth of the online world.

Many small businesses have an intensely local customer base. The Internet is often seen as a great tool for global sales, and it’s easy to forget that it can be used on a neighbourhood scale too.

Take, for example, the cinemas who engage with their customers on Twitter, announcing forthcoming movies and warning regulars when booking may be necessary. Then there are the cafes, reminding customers of their presence by announcing the day’s specials on Facebook… just around lunchtime, when stomachs are rumbling. Councils announce new policies; pubs put out their list of upcoming gigs; bus companies warn of delays or changed routes. The list is endless, and for many of us grateful subscribers to local twitterstreams and Facebook feeds, the benefits have made a small but palpable improvement to daily life.

Facebook recognises this local trend even if we users are less aware of it. It now allows you to advertise within a very tight regional area. So, for example, if you are located in Nottingham, you can choose for your ads to only appear to that city’s residents. Got a branch in Sheffield too? No problem – you can pick and add as many cities as you wish. What’s more, you can choose to advertise within a 10, 25, or 50 mile radius, thus reaching as many outliers as is practical for your own individual business.

Check which cities are available on the Create a Facebook Ad page: it may be time to seriously consider investment in this area of marketing now, even if it never seemed worthwhile before.

Online advertising is big business, in case you didn’t already know. Our top search engines would argue that it benefits us to have ads delivered that are specifically tailored to the user – and of course, we can all see that.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, consumers are becoming increasingly worried about the amount of personal information required – albeit retrieved by algorithms and bots, rather than humans – in order to deliver these oh-so-relevant ads.

While Google puts out a lot of PR to let us know just how it is refining our general search results day by day, I was surprised to see how openly Yahoo is trumpeting its research into Computational Advertising. It calls it “a new scientific sub-discipline”, and has its latest papers online for all to see. Fair enough, it’s a fascinating subject – and, just maybe, this degree of transparency will overcome the doubters and engender trust.

Meanwhile, as small business owners, of course, tailored ads – both content-wise and geographically-speaking – will only benefit you. Oh, and those search engines, of course.

We always think its worth drawing attention to businesses who are using internet technologies and online platforms in remarkable ways. By checking them out, you can only learn – and perhaps even build on their ideas.

Recently, I visited the Your Move website on my iPod: it’s an aggregate site bringing together many estate agents’ data in one place. The site, detecting that I was on a mobile device, asked if I’d like to download the app – for free – and, out of curiosity, I did so.

Now, the building of apps is not going to suit every business, but it is perfect for those, like estate agents, where the user is likely to come back again and again before they complete a task. Your Move’s canny developers have clearly thought through exactly what it is the average housebuyer needs, and provided it on a plate.

Enter the postcode of the area you’d like to search in, and filter the results by number of bedrooms, price, etc, and you are served a list of the latest properties. If you see one you like, you can flick through an image gallery, save it, and even send a request to the estate agents to receive more details. It’s basically all the functionality you get on a main website, but compacted handily to fit onto your pocket device.

The result? Well, I may only be window shopping these days, but when the time comes to start house-hunting in earnest, I’ll turn first to the app that’s already right there on my iPod – and that is the sort of return a business wants from an investment like this.

As you may have heard, there’s a new social media platform in town – and it comes from Google. As a business owner, you may be wondering whether it’s yet another place where you have to keep up a presence – like Facebook, Twitter and your blog aren’t taking enough of your time!

Our advice? Wait a little. There’s already been quite a strong backlash in the press (and, ironically enough, on those existing social media platforms), mostly predicated on the way Google introduced its new product. As it’s integrated with GMail (Google’s email service) and switched on by default, many are complaining that it breaches privacy by scanning your contacts and setting them up as your followers with no input required.

If negative feeling reaches critical mass, we may see the service fade away into the background, at least for a while. Remember all the excitement about Google Wave? That receded, once people had gained an invitation, logged in, and found it… well, a little more visionary than they could cope with, shall we say. How about Lively, Google’s virtual world? I’d forgotten that so thoroughly that I just had to Google it to remember its name, and yet, at the time of launch, it was going to be the next great thing.

So don’t launch your Buzz presence yet – if you’ve even worked out how to yet, which would put you a step ahead of the big boys. If you feel brave, click that ‘Buzz’ link in your GMail, and watch, and wait. Then you’ll understand the interface and be ready to leap in when it starts looking like a viable way to promote your business.

Back in September we wrote about the surge in usage of the mobile web. This month, a startling survey from GSMA reveals that 25% of the UK population went online via mobile during last December.

Astonishingly, almost half the time online was spent at one site: Facebook (the next popular domain, Google, is not as much of a surprise). It seems that those with a real Facebook habit cannot bear to put down its networking and socialising capabilities, even while they are out and about.

For you, the business owner, this points to one thing: you need to keep your Facebook presence fresh, current and useful. After all, you know what they say in online marketing: don’t wait for the customers to come to you. These days, you have to go to where they already are – and that, it seems, overwhelmingly, is Facebook.

It’s not exactly rocket science, but we’ve seen research quoted in multiple places this week revealing that small businesses can suffer from poorly-chosen web addresses, or URLs. That’s something which the man in the street could probably have told you himself, but it does beg the question, what makes a good URL?

Well, something snappy, memorable, and easy to fit onto a business card or flyer. Hard-to-remember domain names include those where the business has chosen one of a variety of similar options: who can remember if your friendly local is at duke-of-york.com or dukeofyork.com? Then there are those businesses which choose a totally different URL to their trading name: ocado.com springs to mind. In some ways, it’s a double miracle that they have done so well, since their chosen name doesn’t actually mean anything!

It’s not easy choosing the right domain name, but it’s a decision you should spend as much time over as you did choosing your business’ name in the first place. If you can afford it, buy the .com and the .co.uk versions, and maybe even the .biz and – if applicable – .org. Better that you should have them than your competitors – plus, if you have them all, it won’t matter if your customers type in the wrong one. Just make sure they all redirect to the correct address.

“In the 19th century we built the railways. In the 20th century we built the motorways. In the 21st century let’s build the superfast broadband network that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Britain.”

Stirring words from the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne this week. Earlier this week we reported on the Tories’ use of Google Moderator; it certainly seems like the internet is high on their list of Conservative priorities for the UK’s future.

Indeed, Labour also have their plans, committing to rolling out broadband to 90% of all UK homes by 2012, albeit with a less ambitious speed.

One thing’s for sure – the spread of the internet is unstoppable. Important as it is now to business, it will only become more crucial. When the internet is accessible from every home, and many public spaces beside, shopping, information retrieval, and the purchase of services are likely to happen almost entirely online. Is your business ready for the future our politicians are already planning?

Charities and small businesses might be interested to hear about the little-known (by us, anyway!) Google Moderator. This simple tool allows you to canvass your users on any issue: the Conservative Party, for example, are currently using it on their draft manifesto site, to gather a sense of which issues are of most concern to the British public (or, at least – to inject a slight note of cynicism – those who are comfortable with the online environment).

You, on the other hand, might find it useful for questions which, while they are not politically pressing, would give insight into your business. Would your customers rather you were open from 9-5 or 10-6? Do they prefer free shipping, or totally transparent postal pricing? If you’re a charity, visitors could vote on their preferred priorities. It’s certainly worth a look, in any case.

One of the skills a good online marketer needs is the ability to intuit what folks are searching for when they want your product. The trouble is, while you can easily see which search terms people used to get to your site, you’ll never find out those which they typed in and DIDN’T find you. Maybe your competitor is bidding for those words, or the search query is simply not one you could ever foresee.

Well, not until now. Google has launched the Search-based Keyword Tool, which can analyse your website and match up the products it finds on there with popular searches. Not only will it tell you how many searches it receives per month on each term, but it will even tell you whether competitors are also bidding on those terms.

If nothing else, it should be a time-saver; at best, it’ll be a window into what you could be doing better, and it’s certainly worth playing around with, just to see. Of course, many business owners prefer to outsource the whole business of optimisation and Google Adwords bidding to people like us – in which case, we’ll do the playing around for you, and get right back to you. Google are citing an anecdotal example of a 5% increase for one company after using this tool: we’d love to do the same for you!

Here’s Google’s video explaining the whole thing in layman’s terms, as they do so well: