Last month, we offered a bunch of options for optimizing your local search advertising. Well, here's a way to extend your local search marketing options even further: through your good-old local news guys. In a recent article at Search Engine Land, KeyRelevance's Chris Silver Smith suggests three ways to optimize a business for local search via newspaper sites:

Get listed in the classifieds. Most newspapers have online versions of their classified ads. Some even provide free listings, requiring you to pay only for "premium" features. "These may be worth the advertising fee if they're cheap enough, friendly enough for search engine spiders and popular enough to be sought out by local consumers," says Smith.

Expand your listing/profile in the newspaper's yellow pages. Optimize your business profile information on each local newspaper's online yellow pages. Note: Some newspaper sites have their own proprietary yellow-pages directories on their sites, while others outsource the development and hosting of these pages.

Pitch stories and content to local news reporters. Links and citations that appear within the body of articles can often help boost your rankings splendidly. You can attract the attention of local journalists and bloggers in various ways: Come up with an attention-grabbing stunt, hop on a media feeding-frenzy by engineering a response to a hot current news item, or offer free quotes as an "expert" commentator. Above all, develop good relationships with local reporters.

The Po!nt: You can be news-worthy! "By using these three main avenues of increasing your presence in local news sites," says Smith, "you can improve ... your local ranking 'signal' with Google and other search engines."

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