It’s not happening quickly, but Yahoo continues to integrate Flickr photo content across its network. The newest instance I’ve seen is on Yahoo’s Local News beta site. Here’s the Yakima-Pasco local news page:

If you were to follow the link above the photo, and then scroll down just a tiny little bit, you’ll find this little content widget in the right column which — at the moment I’m typing this — is showing 16 photos from MY Flickr photostream. Yowza! Four photos appear at a time, and there’s a nice Ajaxy scrollbar that will show the rest of the photos when you click the arrows. It looks like this:

What’s the Point?

This opens up yet another door for any local business with a photographic/visual element to acquire eyeballs. Keep in mind that Yahoo News is the No. 1 news site online (wish I could find a link for that), so this is not an opportunity to ignore. I’ve written before about how to market on Flickr, so that’s a good place to get started if you’re not on Flickr yet.

Optimizing Flickr Photos for Yahoo Local News

From what I can tell, this is really simple. It doesn’t matter what title or description you give your local photos. Links don’t matter. Comments, favorites … who cares?!

There’s only one thing you need to do to have a shot at showing up in this Yahoo Local News widget: Geotag your photos via the Organizr tool on Flickr. All 16 of my photos appearing on the Yahoo Local News page above are geotagged to a specific location.

But, are there any traffic benefits?, you ask. Well, I only heard about this because my photographer friend, Phil, noticed some of his Flickr photos were getting increased traffic from the Pittsburgh, PA, page on Yahoo Local News.

Since it only takes about 3 minutes to geotag Flickr photos, and you can do it in batches, why not spend the time and see if you can get some photos into Yahoo Local News?

(This post was written last week and scheduled for posting today.)