I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no links….

It might be a bit too geeky for some small biz owners, but I think there’s some real valuable information in this WebmasterWorld thread: How Do Search Engine Robots Work? As with all forum discussions, you have to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. Tip: my questions/comments are chaff; the replies I got are wheat.

You might be wondering if a podcast is right for your small biz, and one great way to answer that question is to listen to as many podcasts as you can. Figure out what you like, what you don’t, and get ideas for how podcasting might work for you. Luckily, there’s a growing number of podcasts and podcast episodes about small business, and Jenn Laycock discussed several of them earlier this week on Search Engine Guide.

I always like to see small businesses get creative with their marketing. And Patrick Schaber found a winery doing just that: A Great (and tasty) Marketing Example. Removable stickers on a wine bottle is not quite revolutionary in the grand scheme of things, but as I wrote in the comments there, wine bottles are sacrosanct across that industry, and any time you see one winery getting creative like this, it’s worth talking about.

How about a couple local search links? Sure! What link-o-rama would be complete without them, right? Right.

• SearchDay: Social Features Key to Yahoo Local — includes some interesting stats about local search and user reviews:
  

  Overall, 67 percent of respondents said they would be likely to post a review, with 9 percent of respondents more likely to post a review that was negative, 8 percent more likely to post a review that was positive, and 50 percent likely to post a review either way.

• Search Engine Land: Local and the Paradox of Participation — Greg Sterling writes a reaction piece to the SearchDay article discussing the challenges of getting users to write reviews, etc.

I’m assuming many of the Inc. 500 “Fastest Growing Private Companies” are small businesses, which makes some of the stats about their adoption of social media very intriguing. Andy Beal details it: Inc. 500 Embracing Social Media Faster Than Fortune 500.

And finally, the YPN blog posted Part 2 of that series on “Optimizing for Relevancy”, and it turns out to be a nice, little “SEO 101″-type bit that I think some small business owners would really learn from.

So, that’s all for this week. Go …. TEAM! Yes, go team. That’s all I’ll say. I refused to mention them by name last Friday, and they won their playoff game. Clearly, superstition rules the day.

Have a great weekend, and thanks for reading SBS!