One of the great things about the internet is that it makes it possible for a blogger in Cleveland to swap links with a e-commerce maverick in Tokyo. It’s global. It’s uniting.

But despite the web’s ride reach, it’s often better to target a smaller radius of customers, using a process called local internet marketing. Local marketing can help companies of all shapes and sizes, but it is particularly useful for small business advertising.

Let’s take a look at some quick steps for a successful local internet marketing campaign:

• Define your audience. While some businesses target entire states, others restrict their focus to specific cities and suburbs, and still others concentrate their efforts on select neighborhoods. Figure out how far you want to “zoom in” with your SEO campaign.
• Submit to local directories. Just like your business is listed in your local phone book, it’s important to create listings on directories online, such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Superpages.com, and Bing Local.
• Create a mobile presence. As smart phones become more and more popular, it’s important to focus on internet marketing techniques that translate to those tiny mobile screens. Foursquare.com is a good place to start.

Google Caffeine, the search engine’s revamped indexing system, launched a little over a week ago — and in that time, the internet marketing community has gone from so worried to “So what?”

Instead of layers — the foundation of Google’s previous indexing technique — Google Caffeine indexes a bunch of small chunks of the web simultaneously. Before, certain layers were being updated more frequently than others. But now content will be indexed much more frequently (and evenly), allowing for results “50 percent fresher” (according to Google).

In an industry like SEO, change is usually bad. All of our methods are built around The Way Things Are, not The Way Things Might Be After Google Updates Something.

But since Google Caffeine was created to deliver “fresh” search results, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. After all, it’s one of the tenants of internet marketing — and the web in general — that pages, blogs, profiles, Twitters, and so on should be frequently updated. If we wanted static content, we’d read a book.

The bottom line — business marketing companies haven’t reported any change in rankings since the launch of Google Caffeine. It hasn’t hurt us yet, and eventually, it might even help.