I’d like to add a small insight that can help with a local blog. It kinda goes against what you said about sitemaps.

I think they are really useful if want to get more local exposure via some more slightly more advance strategies.

You can do two things to really hammer your local hyperlocalblog – submit to be a Google news site. Easier then you think. And add Video to your blog and submit a Google video XML sitemap , both opportunities will drive a ton more traffic to your local blog.

This of course is a little more advance stuff, but worth pursuing if you want more traffic and exposure through the search engines.

A lot of basic stuff covered here. Good info for those just starting out.

Lets say you have a local blog that has concerts or shows at a local stadium or theatre. First I’d write a page or post about the theatre, and I’d put it in the “shows & concerts” category. I would also tag it with the name of the theatre say “Acme Theatre”.

Then everytime a new show or concert was announced I’d write about it and tag it with Acme Theatre.

Here’s where the magic happens, you could do this manually but I’m lazy and use plugin called crosslinker, everytime it comes across a word it links it. So I would set up “Acme Theatre” to link to the tag “acme theatre”. So in the post as long as I mention “acme theatre” it sets up a link to the tag page. If you do something like creating custom category or tag pages [http://www.sugarrae.com/thesis-tutorial-creating-custom-categories/] you have a great user experience and a crawling point for the bots.