Small Business SEM

(What a week…is it really Friday?)
One of the best posts I’ve read all year: The Future of Communications – A Manifesto for Integrating Social Media into Marketing by Brian Solis. Yes, it’s long. Yes, it starts a bit slow. But you’ll be glad you read the whole thing very carefully.
And on a somewhat related note, [...]

“We all want to be big, big stars … but we got different reasons for that”
Let’s start with a couple from one of my favorite topics: Local Search. First, Greg Sterling has an interesting write-up about an interesting search tool called “Palore” that can add a lot of valuable information to local search business listings. [...]

It was more than four months ago that I reported about what looked like the closure of the bCentral Small Business Directory. Today, MSN sent out an email to directory participants detailing what we suspected all along: It’s being retired.
But, the language in their bCentral transition FAQ is more than a bit confusing.
Effective May 18th [...]

And she’s buying a stairway to linkheaven…
Hot off the presses is a good post from Loren Baker within the last couple hours titled Link Building : Measuring Directory Value. He sums up another discussion on the topic and adds in a few additional ideas and resources.
Lee Odden, one of my former interviewees, has a [...]

I’m in the middle of re-designing my wife’s real estate web site, which has sat dormant for too long now. I’m hardly a master designer, but we can do better than that 2004 version.
She’s also trying a lot of new things to market her web site, like writing a real estate blog and [...]

Background: Microsoft recently closed its Small Business Directory (SBD) to new submissions, and the Open Directory (DMOZ) has essentially been offline since before Halloween. There’s no indication that the SBD will be back, and many are wondering if DMOZ will survive the current downtime.
Current: For some reason, this is not getting much “big picture” [...]

Is the Microsoft Small Business Directory closed? Seems to be the case.
Here’s the Add Your Site page, which details the costs and benefits, and has a link at the bottom saying Sign Up & Get Your Small Business Listed Today! But when you click that link, you end up here:
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/online/services-transition.mspx
And that page says certain MSFT [...]

(Still catching up - only 126 more Bloglines articles to read and I’m done!)
If you’ve been reading SBS long enough, you may recall my suggestion back in July that small business owners/webmasters take advantage of the “NOODP” tag in order to stop Google and MSN from using your web site’s listing data from DMOZ - [...]