Yellow Pages sales forces are greatly aided if they have comprehensive profiles of businesses ready to go. This can now be accomplished by Web crawling for company info, trademarks, logos, articles, management bios and other content, said 3L System Group CEO Joakim Richter during his keynote at The Kelsey Group’s DMS ’08 conference. “It is pushed to the screen prior to the sales call,” he said.

3L’s crawling is now being used by Eniro in its native Scandinavia, Local Insight Media in the United States, and other YP publishers in Europe and Asia. Richter says the “pre-generated” info is a vital component of a package that includes Web site development and other features.

“Five years ago, content for the Yellow Pages industry was equal to contact info. But that’s not enough to start selling online today,” said Richter. “The online marketplace demands publishers to be more content driven.”

Is there still a role in local search for a “niche” provider like Gannett’s Planet Discover? The question comes up after Boston.com VP of Product Bob Kempf said there really is no substitute for a major search engine tie, and that alternative solutions would be “second rate.”

Planet Discover CEO David Lenzen certainly thinks there is a role for his company. In a note written in response to the Boston.com post, Lenzen articulates several reasons why the company is still relevant. I thought it was interesting enough to merit more than just a “comment.” I’ll be talking with Lenzen in depth next week. But in the meantime, here is the text of his note:

Niche companies like Planet Discover, while not necessarily having the massive powerof a major search engine, make up for that by focusing in on a narrower set of data. In Planet Discover’s case, it is local search. Planet Discover realizes it is not just about search power alone, it is about providing search relevancy that is tied to local businesses. Local search users are not interested in buying from acme.com, they want to find a local business with the products or services they are looking for.

On the other side of the search coin a local advertiser wants to pay for ads that are going to drive sales to their business. The market for local advertising is to get people into your store not necessarily your web site. For example, say I want a used musical instrument. I am not going to go to a major search site and search for ‘used trumpet,’ I am going to get a bunch of auction sales and other online businesses where I won’t be able to go and touch or play the instrument before making a purchase. I want to go to a local site, put in ‘used trumpet,’ and get results for local dealers. From there I can bring up the integrated map and see where the business is and read reviews from local customers.

As the article also stated. it is much more about the local brand, such as Boston.com, than who is providing the search. In many cases people don’t even know who, or how, the search works, they just like the results they get.

In addition to providing the local directory search, Planet Discover has a very extendable search platform that allows for a wide range of data sources to be indexed and controlled. This allows us to provide local search solutions for content sources such as news articles, blogs, auto listings, and real estate that are either too diverse or small for a larger company to deal with.

Planet Discover’s platform allows for variable indexing intervals, giving much more immediacy to data that large search engines do not necessarily provide. This allows articles that a newspaper publishes on their web site to be available almost immediately in the search results. Large search engines can take days or even months for those kinds of results to gain relevancy.

Yahoo! announced that it will make a considerable change to its result pages, and the content it will allow Web sites to provide in organic listings.

According to the Yahoo! Search Blog:

Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

Yahoo! calls out Yelp specifically as being a beneficiary of this move, in being able to have direct links to its reviews for specific businesses when searches are done for those businesses (users are a primary beneficiary too). Yelp’s deep review content currently makes it very SEO friendly and it often does rank well in result pages for local businesses with lots of reviews.

But what’s different about this is the structured presentation of organic listings, in the spirit of the “blended” search results users are coming to expect. In that way, this is yet another move toward universal search, blended search, whatever you want to call it. I’ll be at SMX West tomorrow where Yahoo! has a big presence, and I’ll find out as much as I can.

Before & After (care of the Yahoo! Search Blog):

ComScore Video Metrix announced today that December saw 10 billion online video views — the largest number to date. There were meanwhile 141 million total unique users to video sites. Google sites led in both categories.

This general trend has sifted down to a local level in the increasing popularity of local merchant ads on local search sites and IYPs. It’s also taking form in other ways such as video classifieds and how-to videos. We’re seeing this trickle-down dynamic happen in a few other places such as the general popularity of social networking that has manifest in other ways in local (Facebook Ads, rating and review sites, social “foodie” sites, etc.).

As video gains more exposure and acclimation among local searchers, demand will only grow among small and medium-sized businesses, which will increasingly see it as a viable local marketing tool. Online video should be enticing to most SMBs in theory because it lowers the traditional barriers to video advertising (previously limited to cable spot advertising). It also combines the entertaining, emotional and branding attributes of video with the direct response capabilities of the Internet and local search (more here).

The many funding announcements and deals we’re seeing between publishers and video vendors are a vote of confidence that this demand will continue to grow.

Most of the discussion on local video advertising has happened around IYPs and local search sites such as Citysearch. This is certainly where most of the activity is taking place as these companies are taking the guesswork out of video production and distribution for resource-constrained SMBs. This is of course happening with the help of a growing list of video vendors, such as TurnHere, whose services IYPs essentially resell.

But on the other side of this coin are SMBs that decide to go it alone. This is a rare breed among the ranks of resource-constrained and tech-illiterate small businesses that make up the universe. But this animal has proved to learn some clever tactics to get its branding “out there” via video. One way this has happened is simply through uploading new or existing creative to YouTube and making sure it is SEO friendly.

The reason this is an interesting approach has a lot to do with the universal search (or blended search) movement being pushed by Google, Yahoo! MSN and Ask.com (which is the unsung hero and most meaningful practitioner of the movement). For those who don’t know, universal search seeks to evolve the search engine result page from a series of text links to a more multimedia-rich blend of images, maps, local results and video. (Amazon’s A9 was an early pioneer of this, circa 2005).

The thought is that users’ expectations are evolving to want everything in one place online. Compare that with traditional media where everything is siloed in different buckets (television, radio, newspaper, classifieds, Yellow Pages). Rising broadband penetration has also helped to push this forward, at least where video comes into play.

So the point is, as search engine algorithms look more favorably on video content for the top spots on their results pages, opportunity for exposure increases for any video producer that is on top of his SEO game. Combine this with the dearth of video content (relative to the greater universe of text on the Web) and there is some prime real estate for the picking (above image of Austin, Texas-based Precision Camera’s spoof on Mac/PC ads in the second spot on Google).

In some ways, this could also represent a back door way into top spots in Google that are traditionally impossible to get because of popularity or bid pressure (keywords such as “restaurant, Manhattan”). Because some top spots are “saved” for video and because of, again, the relative dearth of video supply, optimized videos can essentially find a secret side door into these coveted spots (at least for now).

So what are these SEO tactics? One example some clever SMBs (and search engine marketers) have started to use is to have the video on their Web sites linked to the same video that has been uploaded to YouTube. When Google sees that the copy and tags surrounding the video are the same as the corresponding video on YouTube, it will rank the video highly as part of its general favorability of YouTube content. Clever.

Back to IYPs, they should see an opportunity in this trend. Instead of having video content buried within their own listings, is there an opportunity here to make videos more portable and optimized to live on in other places such as YouTube and Google results pages? This has the potential to not only drive traffic back to IYPs, but also carry their branding, which enhances exposure through viral distribution. Not to mention that IYPs can stake a claim in this universal search land grab.

Many more interesting SEO tactics are possible, and there is an announcement coming next week from a company that specializes in this very thing (can’t yet discuss). Stay tuned.