The Berry Co., the SMB sales giant with 260,000 SMB clients, has partnered with Yodle for Web site creation and search engine marketing and optimization. The deal gives Yodle access to Berry’s 42-state reach and 885 print publications. Yodle, which is in something of a horse race with SMB resellers such as ReachLocal, WebVisible, Marchex and others, currently has a presence in 25 markets.

Berry, which calls itself “your local leads expert,” was sold to Local Insight Media last year. It is also an authorized resellers for AT&Ti’s Yellowpages.com, so it is essentially going to be splitting its sales products. SMBs will be offered online listings and video advertising from Yellowpages.com, and Web sites and SEO/SEM with Yodle. Berry is also an authorized reseller for Google AdWords.

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham says the deal with Berry, Ma Bell’s legacy sales company, has been “a long time in the making.” Tests began in May last year, and the arrangement is now live in some markets, with “methodical, region-by-region” rollouts likely to be completed by the end of summer. He also notes that Berry now becomes its largest partner, but that Yodle is private labeling solutions with “four or five” other companies as well.