Small Business SEM

MSN’s Local Search property, Live Search Maps, used to rely on Localeze for all its business listings. If you wanted to add or edit a listing in MSN Local, that’s where you went to take care of it.
That’s since been replaced by MSN’s own Local Business Listings Center, which operates quite similarly to Google’s [...]

I’ll admit to not using MSN Search … err, “Live Search” … very often, so I was surprised to see some new content appearing in the SERPs over the past few days. By all accounts, it looks like a very early version of what has now become “Universal Search” (Google’s term) or “Blended Search” (everyone [...]

I’ll be watching you / Every link you take…
MSN Search … err, Live Search… doesn’t really have a lot going for it. Nobody uses it. No one optimizes for it. And so it stinks that they’ve taken away the one thing it did better than anyone else: advanced link query operators. Sheesh.
Meanwhile, here are a [...]

(The title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek…)
Ever since Microsoft started talking years ago about having its own search engine, people have been talking about how an MSFT search engine would hurt Google and Yahoo because of all those “default” users that are MSN customers and/or Internet Explorer users.
It’s been 2+ years since MSN launched its own search [...]

While I haven’t personally had much reason to use the Google Sitemaps tool/service, I’m betting a lot of you do and so this becomes an important piece of news:
The sitemaps protocol will soon be supported by Yahoo! and MSN, too.
Coverage:

Google Webmaster Central blog
MSN Live Search blog
Yahoo! Search blog
Yeah, having one protocol to use so you [...]

Brian Smith just wrapped up a 4-part series on Search Engine Watch about the various ways the major SEs sometimes tweak their SERPs to provide additional information at the top, above the traditional Top 10 listings. You probably know these as “Onebox” results in Google, or as “Shortcuts” in Yahoo. While I was really hoping [...]

Never in my life would I have guessed I’d see the phrase “very exciting” used to describe a search macro. But there it is, right out in the open for all to see on the MSN Live Search blog. And I actually think the phrase is used correctly, too!
MSN is announcing a new LinkFromDomain search [...]

Bill S. at SEO by the Sea has a look at a recent Microsoft patent application which covers the fairly familiar territory of how to identify location-based information on a web page.
MSFT describes a system where they’ll classify the location-based info. into three categories: provider location, content location, and serving location. Bill explains what [...]