This article came just in time. I used to work with address normalization and geocoding with a prior employer that had premium geocoding libraries available (like Group1 Centrus aka Sagent Centrus), so I know what is possible. Now I'm having to do similar work with less resources at a new place, and I'm also trying to give it a SQL 2005 spin. This article hits the mark, and saves me some work. Thank you.

Normally, for this type of service, you want to normalize/standarize the addresses before you geocode them (which fixes the apartment number issue). You can develop your own code to do this, or you can use an address normalization package. For the US and Canada, low cost alternatives include Semaphore Corp ZP4, and ZipInfo Perfect Address.

I found this site http://www.batchgeocode.com that allows you to geocode multiple addresses also using the Yahoo API, if you only need to do a one time run. You can optionally map the first 100 (using Google).

If you don't need high accuracy, need to geocode a large number of addresses quickly, and can live with zip level geocodes, a free alternative is to use the US Census ZCTAs (Zip Code Tabulation Areas). You can download the 2000 ZCTA file, and query it by zip code (or by major Zip Code). Not all zip codes are available, and some zip codes have changed since then, but it gets you pretty close. There is supposed to be a ZCTA 2003 file, but I haven't been able to find it.