Small Business SEM

Aaron Wall wrote a great post this week that I kept out of the Friday night link roundup because I wanted to comment on a bit. The post has the daunting title, Wasting Link Authority on Ineffective Internal Link Structure, but it boils down to this: Don’t let your user-friendly pages hurt your SEO efforts.
As [...]

One of my recent projects at work involved helping to write a report on specific SEO tactics for the retail industry. I was asked to write about 2-3 pages of strategies, but then got on a roll and ended up writing about 7 pages. Whoops! (Me? Wordy? No way…)
Marchex/TrafficLeader published the report today, under the [...]

Good evening. It’s 11:00 pm, and here’s tonight’s news.
MarketingVox recaps a BusinessWeek article that talks about Big Brands pushing small business out of the paid search market: “…brand giants like Best Buy and Zale are diverting more and more of their marketing to search ads, driving up prices and stealing customers from smaller businesses that [...]

Down in Arizona today, Dave Wallace met with a network of small business owners in his local area — people from banking to home improvement to auto repair and more. He says he gave them a basic pitch on SEM and SEO, and then….
What shocked me a bit was when I polled the group as [...]

I’m headed out the door in a couple hours for a quick flight across the country, so posting will be light for a couple days.
Of note (i.e., stuff I’d post about in greater length if I could):

IAC, parent of Ask.com, is planning a new local search destination they’re calling “AskCity,” according to the ClickZ news [...]

Lee Odden interviews Adam Lasnik of Google today, and they spend a couple questions discussing Google Base, which happens to be one search marketing opportunity that I think a lot of small businesses are overlooking … and shouldn’t be.
Google Base has already been integrated into the main SERPs for some real estate searches and, [...]

Can small businesses compete in the current search marketing environment? That was the question I addressed in my presentation earlier this month at SES in San Jose. Regular readers of Small Business SEM will remember that my answer was “Yes,” with a combination of working smarter, working harder, and being more creative. If you read [...]

digg_url = ‘http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/2006/08/17/why-click-guarantees-suck/’;

ClickZ.com re-ran an article by Justin Sanger today that I missed the first time around. He takes a well-deserved shot at the click guarantees offered to small business owners by Internet yellow pages acting as resellers for AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.
Not familiar with the concept? Here’s a quick overview:
Guaranteed click packages [...]