Small Business SEM

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 [...]

Couple interesting and helpful things to pass along from the comments you’ve left on recent posts:
First, Gradiva Cousin has shared some of her research on PDF optimization in my recent Optimizing PDFs for SEO post. Her tip is about using the metadata title to control how your PDF might appear in the SERPs (especially Google). [...]

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 not convinced you can use Flickr as a marketing/SEO tool? Have a look at this:

What is it? It’s a screenshot showing that this photo has a PageRank of five (5).
Don’t you think you could benefit from a link on a PR5 web page, especially a link that doesn’t have a nofollow tag?
Note: I’m [...]

… to all of you in (or out) of the U.S. who celebrate the holiday. I’ll be enjoying the long weekend with my family, giving thanks for what has been the best non-marriage, non-childbirth year of my life. So many blessings, the head spins.
Be well,
Matt

Back at SES San Jose in August I must’ve heard the word “signal” more than any other word that week, i.e. - “What signal are you sending to the search engine?” Everything you do, in some way, is a signal to the search engines. I’ve talked about this in terms of what I call LinkRank, [...]

Hard to believe that SES Chicago is only a couple weeks away — less than that, I guess, since it starts on December 4th. It’ll be my first visit to Chicago, and second SES conference overall. As was the case in San Jose in August, I’ll be speaking again — but I’ve got two sessions [...]

It’s time again for dueling search share stats. Nielsen and comScore have both released their own figures related to search engine market share.
comScore
Nielsen/NetRatings (pdf file)
Both have Google, Yahoo, and MSN in that order. There are some differences in the details, and you can read about that at MarketVox if you’re so inclined.
Me? I’m intrigued [...]